there was a touring production of Sweeney Todd where all the actors were also the musicians. When they weren’t on stage, they would pick up a cello, accordion, or get behind a piano.

It’s one of my favorite pieces I’ve seen.

Honorable mentions to an adaptation of Night of the Living Dead, Faust, and The Metamorphosis

I really adore the importance of being earnest.

I also have a soft spot for twelfth night, because I once played Sebastian in a slightly better than you might expect for high schoolers adaptation.

But aside from a handful of other Shakespeare works, a couple of musicals, and the plays I've worked crew on, I have very little experience with live theater and I increasingly regret it.

I've been thinking more about Theater.

It's shocking to me that live theater isn't more of a part of people's lives.

Our town has a great theater (building/stage) but the local community theater (organization) does so little with it.

Every town I've lived in, in fact, as had essentially this.

I've seen three or four performances in "local theaters" by local theater orgs over the last 25 years, and they've been fine, sometimes good sometimes bad, but *shockingly* infrequent.

Part of this is on me, I have missed a couple of opportunities to see things here in town but ...

They host four performances per show, usually. They do between two and four shows per year.

Most of the rest of the time, the building is just empty.

And it's an all volunteer cast and a mostly volunteer crew and we're a small town. I understand why they don't do more performances per show.

I mostly understand why their existing crew doesn't do more shows, even.

But it still feels like a real missed opportunity to not have an occasional tour come through.

tours are expensive, and it’s hard to pay when people aren’t showing up. I know a lot of the economics of community theatre. I ran the largest one in North Alabama for a bit.

Rights are also per-show, so most of the time, unless it’s a crazy popular (also usually expensive) musical, it doesn’t make sense to do. We spent around $5000 on my production of Arsenic and Old Lace. We spent close to $20k on The Little Mermaid.

Touring musicians are cheaper to get in than touring theatre productions, unless you’re talking traveling Children’s theatre like NC Shakes used to do before they died off.

That stage also is not great for what most touring productions would need, aside from some black box style productions.

I miss theatre. I want to get involved again. Time is a finite resource