DRS LAYOFF?

I am just a little confused about the DRS tour, my understanding of the tour was, a few stops were cancled to downscale the tour. Then it would start back up again, but on the National Tour section of BWW.com its posted as the rest of the Nat. Tour has been layed off?

I have tickets for the Boston stop, so I would like to know whats going on.

Thanks!

---

I don't know if this counts as anything, but before I left Boston for the holidays, I walked past the Opera House and they already had the marquee up for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

---

I though they already downscaled the tour and that they are still continuing the tour.

---

yeah, i have tickets for March in Boston. why would they want to downscale the tour?

"I just called the Opera House in Boston and DRS is still scheduled to play there in March."

Og good, thx for calling!

---

The show originally wnet out on the Equity Production contract at full slary and per diem (1456 a week plus around 7-800 in per diem). I think it wasn't doing as big at the box office as they wanted so they went to the cas and to equity and asked that they change the contract to the Equity experimental production touring contract which basically cuts the salary in half. Equity created this new contract to make it more economical for producers to tour shows while keeping them Equity. The one caveat is that the show has to play different markets than they would when they were on the regular production contract. Usually when a tour on the Experimental contract plays a major Market, the salay for that week goes back to regular production. I know that there was some casting done for the tour a few weeks ago for replacements. I assume that some of the people decided to leave after the announcement that the show was being downscaled.
I assume that they also downscaled other things to trim operating costs. I bet they trimmed the set a little to cut one or two of the 18 wheelers.

---

Neverandy, any word on who decided to leave? (I assume Tom Hewitt will be amongst the casualties.)

When I saw the show in Miami, I asked Laura Marie Duncan how the downsizing would influence any possible cast changes. She said that the company were all waiting on hearing exactly how much of a pay cut they would have to take, and once an official number was given, they had the option of leaving if they wanted. She hadn't made up her mind yet about what she was doing, but she said several others had already said they were leaving no matter what.

I hope the majority of this cast somehow stays. They were a very talented group, and the chemistry they all had deffinetly enhanced the quality of the show.

---

The tour has been semi-recast and is now in rehearsals with the new cast at Ripley-Grier... Jack O'Brien was there on Friday. Anyone who is auditioning or whatnot at RG this week will probably run into them, they're there for the rest of this week.

---

Just so we're all clear though, weeks in which a tour doesn't have performances are called "layoff" weeks, regardless of downsizing. This is true of all tours. If a successful tour has a week off, the actors and crew are usually flown back to their base cities, and the week is termed a layoff. For instance, this week the All Shook Up tour has a layoff, but next week they have performances. It's not always possible to book every single week of the year.

So while the fact that DRS is restructuring and recasting is certainly cause to cancel cities, the real answer to the original question is that the show has a layoff, not that the cast and crew have been layed off.