Road Tours

Before the 1870s when trains made travel more practical, most theatre outside of New York consisted of small stock companies who performed from a home base. The only forms of extensive touring before the Civil War were the regional appearances of such stars as Edwin Forrest, Charlotte Cushman, Junius Brutus Booth, and George Frederick Cooke who did not travel with a company but performed their famous roles with local actors. But the thorough railroad network that was completed by the last decades of the 19th century made touring profitable, and almost every town and small city, as well as each major metropolis, built theatres to accommodate road productions. Some of America's favorite stars, from Joseph Jefferson and William Gillette in the 19th century to Katharine Cornell and the Lunts in the 20th century, toured extensively and became beloved favorites across the country as well as in Manhattan. Tours broke into roughly two categories: New York successes that were duplicated and sent out with first‐class companies, and cheaper productions utilizing scripts that were written specifically with the road in mind. Playwrights such as Charles Blaney, Lincoln J. Carter, Owen Davis, Scott Marble, and Hal Reid turned out dozens of these “blood and thunder” melodramas that appealed to the supposedly less sophisticated playgoers across the country. When the road started to wane in the first decade of the new century, it was this latter kind of “popular” theatre that disappeared. After 1910, the road usually meant a traveling version of a New York hit. It is estimated that there were five thousand theatres across the United States in 1900; by 1932 there were only one hundred, and a third of those were in New York City. In the decades surrounding World War II, these tours could play for several weeks or months in major cities like Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia. Secondary tours, labeled “bus and truck,” were less expensive versions of the first‐class tours and tended to play split weeks in less‐populous cities. But when the number of Broadway offerings shrunk in the 1960s, the road suffered. Musicals were particularly successful on tour, but so few new works originated from Broadway in the 1970s and 1980s that road producers were (and still are) often reduced to presenting old favorites, particularly if they had recently enjoyed a successful revival in Manhattan. By the end of the 20th century, the road had dwindled to major Broadway musicals playing in large houses (sometimes even converted movie palaces) for short runs in major cities. Nonmusical plays rarely tour unless a name performer is attached to it, and “bus and truck” companies tend to play college campuses and arts centers where the overhead is much smaller than at the traditional “road houses.” The rise of the regional theatre network in the last four decades of the century may have contributed to the decline of the road. Yet these resident theatres rarely produced the large and spectacular Broadway musicals on which tours continued to depend. The future of the road seems to be Broadway's brassiest works visiting America's biggest urban markets.