Muncie, The Beginning Of The End

Muncie was my next to last stop on The Wizard of Oz before moving over to Beauty and the Beast. It was also the first time that I did not play the show. Since after our Christmas break, Mike and I had been trading parts in sound check so that he could get some time in on my book before the new guy arrived. Well Trevor, my replacement (well technically the replacement for Mike who switched to my book), arrived the week before in Lubbock. Since then Mike had been observing and was starting to get a bit antsy to start playing my book. He asked on the way to Muncie if I minded letting him play the show. Part of me kind of wanted to play Muncie since I was given a scholarship for Ball State University (which I of course turned down in favor of IU), but the show comes first!

So since I wasn't playing, I could walk around campus in the freezing cold and not have to worry about whether my fingers would work afterwards!

Monica and I decided to get in a game of snow volleyball.

Art

Nothing about the Emens Auditorium is beautiful.

It was fun to be back at the Emens though. I had seen the Miss Saigon tour with Brian Jose at this theatre a few years ago.

Cape Girardeau

After an earlier stopover in Cape Girardeau, we returned to actually play the show there.

I may not always geographically know where exactly we are, but sometimes there are signs!




Levee wall art.

The face of the Catholic Church...well a face on a Catholic Church.

The theatre was more functional than beautiful which is often the case on college campuses.

The Other Columbia

Our engagement in Columbia, Missouri was a one nighter in every sense of the term. I'm not going to try to narrate this post as I do not really remember much. We drove in, did the show, and left. In fact my most powerful memory of Columbia was that there was a Chipotle right by the theatre where I ate dinner!

It is never a good sign when we pull into the venue and see all of the road boxes sitting outside the stage. Especially when the venue is on a college campus and there are people constantly walking right past all of the equipment!

It was a college, but it might as well have been a high school just based on the auditorium!

That can't be good.

The Wizard of Oz Finally Lands in Kansas (For a Stopover)

So am I the only one who finds it to be ironic that our tour of The Wizard of Oz has yet to play in Kansas? We still have not played there, but we did have a stopover night in Wichita en route to Columbia, Missouri.

Our hotel was right next to the Performing Arts Center which is where we would have played had our tour played there. As I was out looking for food, I passed the theatre and noticed that they were going to be having the latest tour of The Wedding Singer. This is not a continuation of the NETworks tour, but it is the same physical production bought out by a different company. The creepy thing is that they are using some of the production photos from our tour. It is a bit strange to see pictures of Merritt knowing that he has nothing to do with this tour!

The Metropolis of Wichita.


I did discover an old Orpheum Theatre downtown. I wouldn't have minded seeing The Great Muppet Caper!

Wichita is where I finally gave in and saw the Avatar movie in 3D. In fact it was one of those fancy cinemas with servers who come to your seat to take your order. It seems a little silly to have a server bring you popcorn, but others in our group ordered actual food and drinks. Also I had a notable first at this cinema. I asked my server to bring a sufficient amount of the powdered ranch flavoring for my popcorn, and she actually brought me more than I could have used for a week's worth of movie theatre popcorn. In fact, I used so much that it made me a bit sick!

That's about it for our stopover. This building was pretty cool. It made up for all of the other uninteresting buildings!!

Welcome to Lubbock (Don't Mind The Dust Storm!)

From the moment we turned into the hotel parking lot in Lubbock, I knew that I wasn't going to like Lubbock. There was a giant Wal Mart across the street and the sky outside was yellow because Lubbock was experiencing a dust storm. That did not stop me from walking to the theatre, but you can bet that I was cursing Texas the whole time. Thankfully we got into town on Friday and left Sunday morning so I did not have to suffer long.

There really is not much to Lubbock. Well at least the area that we were staying in. Our hotel was actually on Avenue Q (insert theatre nerd joke here!). The hotel was close enough to downtown for me to walk around and explore.

Sadly I only found two interesting things downtown. Firstly this little theatre.

The other interesting thing was something that I already knew about, but it would have become more and more obvious the closer I got to it had I not known.

The sidewalk bricks with engraved with Buddy Holly song titles and the street named after him could only mean one thing...

a giant pair of Buddy Holly glasses! I did not have time to go in the Buddy Holly Center, but I have a feeling it is less interesting than Graceland. Just a guess.

As for our theatre, it was on the campus of Texas Tech University.

I assume that this is a Red Rider?! (Well a bronze one at least)

To continue with the theme of my experience with Lubbock it turns out that the City Bank Auditorium is probably the ugliest theatre I have played thus far.

The outside looks fine, but it disguises the horrors waiting inside.

Asbestos on the way to the pit.

Dead bugs

And the ugliest theatre ever!!

In fact the theatre was so ugly that I had a nose bleed during the show (well the dust storm, asbestos, and dead bugs might have contributed too)!