 |
| Daniel Berger-Jones as Colonel Dalrymple, Bill Mootos as Royall Tyler, and Lewis Wheeler as Samuel Dexter in Blood on the Snow. Photo by Nile Scot Shots |
The 2017 production of Blood on the Snow at the Old State House in Boston is finally over. This is the longest any of my shows has ever run, and that's not even counting the initial 4-week run last year. For the second time, we basically sold out the entire run, which was very exciting. It's a small house (56 seats), which makes for an intimate, immersive theatrical experience. We had more than 3,000 audience members over the course of the run. (Interesting stat--22% of the first year's audience returned to see the show a second time this season.)
Most of our cast returned for the second run, and we were very fortunate to pick up extremely talented replacements and understudies. Our production team of producer/museum liaison Peter Meacham, stage manager Jeremiah Mullane, and director Courtney O'Connor managed a complex casting calendar--with a cast of 10 over 12 weeks, with various scheduled absences--and kept the show running at a high level, seamlessly for the entire run.
I still have a lot to process from the whole experience (and will write about it eventually), but one of the more interesting aspects of such a long run was watching the performances deepen and mature over time. This is a play set in 1770, in a Boston that had a population of only 15,000 and everyone knew everyone. Especially the men in this room. After 3 months of a run (and for some of the actors, 2 years of performing together), there were glances and gestures between these people that really felt like they'd known each other for a long time. The level of detail of performance just kept getting richer and richer, with each passing week.
I'm already missing the cast and crew for this show. It's common to experience a bit of post-partum depression at the end of a run, and this project is one that I'd been working on since 2013. (I'm doing carpentry on my house to keep me from moping around too much.) There's a strong chance that the show will come back again, and I've always got new projects coming up. This production will always be close to my heart.
In case you want to hear a bit about the show, here's a video of me and Nat Sheidley (Executive Director of the Bostonian Society) at History Camp Boston this spring, talking about the 2016 production.
