Tour Tales (Patreon)

My favorite part of doing this show is the touring. I love the writing, too, of course, but getting to travel from city to city, and country to country, is an absurd privilege of this job. We get to meet fans. We get to see parts of the world we’d never get to see otherwise. And most thrilling for me, we get to perform on a stage, live, in front of people. It’s fantastic.

It’s also a pain in the ass, because I have to leave home for a few weeks at a time. I have to get up early to repack my suitcase and then hop in a van and/or a train and/or a plane and do the exact same thing every day.

But to tell the truth it’s not really the same. Every theater is different. We got to perform at the Sydney Opera House, which is a huge complex with a large tech staff and vast series of comfortable dressing rooms. Plus it’s the Sydney Fucking Opera House. But we’ve also performed at the Largo in West Hollywood, a considerably smaller, and less-notable venue, but its intimacy with the audience is unmatched.

Audiences are different in every town, too. Some nights the audience isn’t there for the jokes in our show, barely registering a laugh at the punchlines, yet they seem to hang on every word of the plot. And in the end, a standing ovation. Some nights the audience is uproarious and high energy. Some nights (like our first ever show in Amsterdam in 2014) the audience talks back during the show. It’s a rollercoaster ride to be sure.

With over 300 live performances over the last 9 years, it’s impossible to recall every theater and every audience, but here are a few that still rattle around in my head:

Phoenix (2014): We had two shows that night at 7pm and 9:30pm. In between, we’re all hanging out backstage. Joseph Fink and I are in the hallway outside the green room when a man (30s, white, wearing a polo and shorts) walks up and asks Joseph and me if he can talk to Cecil Baldwin. We ask for more info (who tf are you? Why? Etc.) And he says he drove down from Colorado (!!) that day to find out if Cecil grew up in Colorado. (He did not.) This man’s wife went to school with a kid named Cecil, and that kid died. And now this man was wondering if the Cecil from our show was the same Cecil his wife grew up with. I said, “Hey man, good question. Let’s walk and talk.” So I vamped while he and I walked toward the lobby. As we got to the main backstage door, we took two steps into the lobby, I said. “Nope. Well, see you later!” and then closed and locked the doors behind me.

London (2014): Our first London show at Union Chapel in Islington, the audience was so engaged with that performance, that during the curtain call, they began stomping on the old stone and wood seating. The tech staff at the venue had a decimeter to monitor overall sound levels. Union Chapel is in a pretty residential area, and they have to keep noise output below a certain level. Well, the applause spiked to a level the staff had never seen before. That’s a high I’m always chasing.

Northampton/Boston (2016): We write our touring scripts well before we ever put them out on the road. That’s important to know here. The other thing to know is that guest actors join us for some shows but not others, so we write the guest parts so it doesn’t really affect the story overall if that part is taken out. Anyway, Hal Lublin, who plays Steve Carlsberg was joining us in Boston. We had a part written for Steve that slid into the Community Calendar. It was a very Night Vale gag about the annual Marathon where people ran through the desert and were then chased by wolves. Dark, goofy, funny. But it was entirely about a marathon. The night before, we’re in Northampton without Hal in the show yet, and I have post-show drinks with a friend of mine, who casually mentions that tomorrow (the day we’ll be performing in Boston) is the 3 year anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing. Oh fuck. We wrote that bit months ago. First thing in the morning, I’m in the hotel business center writing out a whole new Steve Carlsberg part (I think I went with a Jazz Festival where people are hunted by wolves?) and printed it off. By the time everyone else got to the lobby I handed them new scripts. Though our original text had nothing to do with the bombing, nor really spent a lot of time on the marathon part of things, it was still dark humor about a marathon. It would have been an absolute nightmare disaster for everyone involved. Lesson: if you’re gonna do dark humor, keep a close eye on the news at all times.

That’s all for now. I’ll pop back on here with more tour tales in the future. But that seems like enough for now.

-Jeffrey Cranor