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[0:00] Mary Dina: Hey everyone, welcome to Page to Stage.

[0:03] Brian Sedita: A conversation with theater makers.

[0:04] Mary Dina: We're your hosts.

[0:05] Brian Sedita: That's Brian.

[0:06] Mary Dina: And that's Mary.

[0:07] Brian Sedita: This episode is part of our series on Chicken and Biscuits, a new play by Douglas Lyons.

[0:13] Mary Dina: And it's the second half of our conversation with last week's guest.

[0:16] Brian Sedita: If you haven't already, go back and listen to part one.

[0:19] Mary Dina: We hope you enjoyed this episode.

[0:26] Brian Sedita: With this particular show, Chicken and Biscuits, the actors are going up and down the aisles throughout the play constantly. What responsibility does that put on you guys front of house?

[0:35] Cheryl Dennis: Make sure that they don't run into the audience. Like a lot of times it's no, no, you have to like it's just making sure that the path is clear. Most of the time we get it. We don't always get it. Like Norm has definitely met some fans. Um, but it's make it, yeah, you just you can't run into anybody. And also making sure that like that the ushers know where the cues are, so they're not running into people. The first couple previews, you know, and people do it all the time in our theater because we have these fabulous aisles, and you can light them and you can do all this stuff. So, very uh on most shows, the first like we did it once on the silent, the first couple previews are it's it's the learning track.

And the one thing I always tell people is, you know, by the time by the time you get to first preview, the actors have had tech, the crew has had tech, everybody's had tech except for the front of house. And we're like, here's a show, here's 700 people, don't mess up and make it all run perfectly. So there that to me is always an interesting dynamic.

[1:34] Mary Dina: Yeah, I love that you brought that up because it's it's so interesting because it is it is the audience is really getting a full experience having the front of house staff there. Especially I remember walking in and seeing the ushers with their uh church robes and you know, whatever those the bibs I don't know what to call them. But they're completing the experience, and it's it's the whole theater going experience. Um, so that's it's it's pretty brave that you know you guys don't have that you know preparation going into it, and that's good to keep in mind from now on, walking into first preview.

[2:07] Cheryl Dennis: And this is like again, and I don't mean to keep hearkening back to COVID because I know we all want to talk about anything but COVID. Um, but it was this was also like leaning up to the first preview. We had to put in this entire protocol of getting people in, and like leading up to the first preview, we're like, well, we think it's gonna work, like we put all the pieces in, but we didn't know if we were gonna go up at eight. I I think it was probably no, it was nine o'clock curtain. We didn't know if we were gonna go gonna go up at 8 10 or 9 10 because we'd never tried that particular thing before. And it was, I think it was like around 8 11 or 8 12.

[2:38] Brian Sedita: I was gonna say, I remember where as we were, you know, told, you know, brought Broadway's reopening dates, and people the conversation, at least in my circles, was like, you know, we no one knows how long this is gonna take to load all you know, patrons in, no one knows like if it's gonna have to be a very like one on one, you know, in terms of like showing your ID. No one knew if it was gonna take a long time, but I feel like I mean, I feel like we were in like very quickly. I mean, it was all very safe and it was all very organized.

[3:07] Cheryl Dennis: Thank you.

[3:07] Brian Sedita: I love you.

[3:08] Cheryl Dennis: Yeah.

[3:09] Brian Sedita: Yeah.

[3:09] Cheryl Dennis: I mean, kudos to everybody that is is working so hard to check all those IDs and vaccinations to make everybody feel safe. And I'm I'm actually wondering if we could actually just, you know, pull over on the subject for a second. Um, because I'm always interested to know how does that coordination and orchestration work? Uh, you know, you got the stage managers asking, is everything okay in the house, right? To start the show. How does that work and how has it how had it been working um at Chicken and Biscuits with uh getting the show up and running as quick as possible?

[3:43] Cheryl Dennis: Well, we everybody's on walkie, so we have people up at the top. We also, you know, we have the two levels. So you have what's going on entering the box office lobby, coming down a level, and then what's going on in there. And it's really just everybody's everybody's good at their job. They know what they're supposed to be doing. They're getting the people in, they're coming downstairs. We're all on walkie, and somewhere around eight o'clock, I say, How are we doing? And you know, we're great, we've got a huge line, whatever the answer is. And then probably around on this show, 803, 804, I would start talking stage management, say, okay, it looks like three minutes, it looks like 10 minutes. And you can take it in 60, whatever it wound up being. So it's really just that part that part just kind of irons itself out.

[4:28] Brian Sedita: And you can tell too.

[4:30] Cheryl Dennis: Like you can tell when an audience is ready to sit down and enjoy the show and when they're still kind of mulling.

[4:35] Mary Dina: And would you say that that is like pretty on par with like anything pre-COVID? Because I feel like I mean, I I don't you guys don't have like a concession stand. Do you have like a merch?

[4:45] Cheryl Dennis: Oh, you do have a concession stand.

[4:46] Mary Dina: Oh, great.

[4:48] Cheryl Dennis: Okay, I was gonna say because I feel like a concession stand often like is what slows it all down. I mean, it's very important. Everyone loves the the like the themed drinks, and you know, if they're they need a snack or whatever, but I feel like oftentimes like it can deter people from getting to their seat.

[5:02] Cheryl Dennis: Um when they need to.

[5:04] Brian Sedita: Yes.

[5:05] Cheryl Dennis: Although, I mean, I will say we have we have our bartenders pretty fast, and like once people start hearing bells, they're like, I don't care, pour me a big glass of wine. I'm good.

[5:12] Cheryl Dennis: Thank you. I know I talked about this before, but I like the fact that it worked both on the show side and on the house side because the house is a whole different kind of show.

[5:21] Brian Sedita: It really is.

[5:22] Cheryl Dennis: I bet. And I'm sure it's different every single night by the minute, even.

[5:25] Cheryl Dennis: It is, and you have so many unknown factors, it's really neat. Plus, the other thing that I always love, like our ushers on this show, they love the show. Like literally, we have people dancing in the aisles, and like they would be handing out playbills and they would like be rocking and rolling. But it's also if you what everybody always forgets is nobody talks to the audience more than ushers.

[5:46] Cheryl Dennis: Like they do, they sit there, they talk about the show, they talk about their life, you know, they're cut they know who's coming to the show. It's really an interesting dynamic because I spend I know we I feel like we spend a lot of time in like focus groups and all of and all of that and advertising and marketing, but you also the people who are actually talking to the people coming to the show, it's always your front of house staff.

[6:06] Brian Sedita: I've had people come up to me and tell me, like, I'll say hi, how are you? And they've told me their entire life stories and how they wound up at this show.

[6:13] Cheryl Dennis: I love that, even just from like theater grower to theater grower. I love sitting down next to somebody at the theater, and I don't usually initiate a conversation, but if somebody does, I'm more than happy to talk to them about why they're there that night.

[6:26] Mary Dina: You know, what have you seen recently? I think it's and and the ushers, like you said, it's always really exciting. And I love hearing people ask, oh, so what other shows have you ushered? It's just you know, that's probably your most common question.

[6:38] Cheryl Dennis: Yes, and most people who work front of house absolutely love the theater in a passionate way, and they love watching the show every single night. Maybe a little bit differently to then like your traditional pristine proscenium arch theater.

[6:51] Cheryl Dennis: You know, you could be ushering like house right, you know, one night and have a completely different experience, similar to an audience, and also you have different cues for you know different entrances and exits that you might not have or that you definitely won't have coming from like a house left situation.

[7:06] Mary Dina: Um, do you actually is it do you you do you use that terminology house right and house left?

[7:10] Cheryl Dennis: Is that yeah okay?

[7:11] Mary Dina: Okay, the second time I saw Chicken and Biscuits, there were so many audience members that showed up after the play began.

[7:17] Cheryl Dennis: Oh yeah.

[7:18] Mary Dina: And I mean, I've found that even with Broadway coming back, that has been one of the biggest struggles uh that I've noticed in terms of like going to see a show and then having people walk in front of you or make a lot of ruffling noises and stuff.

[7:33] Cheryl Dennis: And so I'm just wondering from your perspective, because I kind of loved the, you know, a couple years ago, they were there were a couple producers that really were sticklers about putting on the tickets, no late entry into the theater.

[7:47] Mary Dina: Um, wondering how you feel being on the like front of house side, how you feel about like a policy like that being put in place for a production.

[7:56] Cheryl Dennis: If I'm gonna be completely honest, I think it's hard for this on the theater goer because what happens is let's say, let's say that you're the person going to the theater and you bought your tickets, and let's say you spent if it's just a couple, let's say you spent around $300. Let's say you're bringing a family though. Okay, so let's say you spent what at the bare minimum $500 on your tickets, probably more. And you're driving in, you had to get two kids into the car, and you get in the car and you finally drive into the city, and then because you never drive into the city, you hit Lincoln Tunnel tunnel traffic at five o'clock, and your journey takes you an hour longer than you thought.

[8:32] Cheryl Dennis: You then pay 60 bucks to park your car, and you come to the front door of the theater to be told, I'm sorry you can't go in anymore. To me, I know, and believe me, I know. I have been, I've been like, are you really gonna unwrap that candy for 25 minutes while we all sit here and listen to it? Like, here, give it to me. I'll take it outside, I'll wrap it for you, and I will bring it back to you. But to me, I see a lot of that. It happens. The person who's late genuinely usually didn't mean to be late. So I kind of weigh it. I'm like, can I sneak them in in an unobtrusive way so that their evening is gonna turn out to be a great one as opposed to just like this horrible, massive, disappointing thing.

[9:11] Mary Dina: Yeah, I totally get that. And I kind of just wish there was like a happy medium where you know there was like a back row that was reserved for late seaters. I think that that would be the way I try to look at it is I was like, what's going to cause the least amount of disturbance?

[9:26] Cheryl Dennis: Yeah, totally. And I try to do that. I'm actually interested since you started in the early 2000s, how you've seen the evolution of cell phone disturbances.

[9:37] Cheryl Dennis: Um, you know, there's more. I don't know what else to do. There's more. And it's also it's become such a cultural thing. I will tell you, a lot of people don't think that they're doing anything wrong. Like you and I, we're so indoctrinated that we would never even have a cell phone on vibrate when we go to the theater. But again, a lot of people who are coming to theater, and especially you're talking to somebody who goes once a year, maybe twice a year, to them, oh, it's not a big deal to check their text. No, it's a huge deal to us. It's balancing, okay, turn it off. No, really, we mean it. You're not allowed to. What's not cool is when like the people like pick it up and have a whole conversation and like, you know, that it's just not so the evolution is it's gotten progressively worse.

[10:22] Cheryl Dennis: And how do we educate people in not an aggressive way? When I've never ever, ever in my life, not to go off on a tangent, but you asked a house manager about cell phones. What of course this is gonna happen? What I don't understand and have never understood is when you're doing this, you are entirely missing the experience that you paid upwards of a hundred dollars to enjoy. Like if I'm going to go to a restaurant and get a steak that cost a hundred dollars, I'm going to eat every single morsel, and I might like the plate. So don't you want the same experience if you're coming to the theater, you're just ruining your own experience along with everybody else. Our theater, it makes it so much worse because we're in the round. So somebody pulls out a cell phone, you're lighting up half the audience.

[11:06] Cheryl Dennis: And actually, I was I always think whenever we like talk about like cell phone use in the theater, I'm always brought back to the first time that Freestyle Love Supreme came to Broadway, and I don't remember what it was called. It began with a laundry.

[11:19] Mary Dina: Yeah, where like you put it in a pouch.

[11:21] Cheryl Dennis: I haven't actually experienced this, but like you put it in a pouch, and then like they hold on to the pouch.

[11:26] Mary Dina: Some concerts do that, yeah.

[11:27] Cheryl Dennis: Um, I think you just can't unlock the pouch.

[11:31] Cheryl Dennis: You hold on to your pouch. I believe you can't put it in without it being off.

[11:38] Mary Dina: Oh, indeed.

[11:39] Cheryl Dennis: I would hope so because I feel like that would be like a front of house sports nightmare. Like they're holding on to this pouch for this phone that they can't turn off. I mean, what happened when we saw Chicken and Biscuits? There was someone right at the top of the show. It was like an alarm or something, and they couldn't figure out how to turn it off and like it's a little bit more.

[11:56] Cheryl Dennis: It's a playlist. I think they were listening to their own Spotify playlist, and I thought that it was part of the sound design. I'm like, interesting. Okay, so they're still listening, they're still listening to the radio, and it's coming from over here in the audience.

[12:10] Cheryl Dennis: Yeah, not for nothing though. Like, I and you know what I do for a living. I was at a play, and it wasn't a Broadway play. I don't know if it was a reading, I was at something, and I gotten a new Fitbit, and I was like, I don't know, I was just fiddling with it, and somehow I turned my phone on and it started playing like Bon Jovi or something like super loud.

[12:30] Cheryl Dennis: And I was a person who was like rustling and like trying to turn it off. So that's what sometimes it is just inadvertent. Um, but not always. And what's frustrating is when you're like, no, turn it off. No, we mean it. Can you please just turn it off?

[12:44] Mary Dina: Yeah.

[12:45] Mary Dina: Cheryl, do you want to move into our lightning round?

[12:47] Cheryl Dennis: Yeah, let's do it.

[12:48] Mary Dina: If you could trade jobs with another member of the Chicken and Biscuits team for one week, who would it be and why would you want that position?

[12:55] Cheryl Dennis: Warum Lewis, because he has like he ha gave this incredible sermon that brought down the house.

[13:00] Mary Dina: What is one thing in the theater industry that confuses you?

[13:03] Cheryl Dennis: People are enigmas. How about that?

[13:08] Mary Dina: Is there something in your process that you find unique to you at Circle in the Square?

[13:13] Cheryl Dennis: I think my hours. I think I to me it's really important to always have somebody around from the theater side of it to address problems. But I think I probably my process is probably more intense than other people in my job's process.

[13:30] Cheryl Dennis: And I don't know if it's necessary, but it feels necessary to me.

[13:33] Mary Dina: What's one hobby that you have outside of theater?

[13:36] Cheryl Dennis: Yoga and hiking.

[13:38] Mary Dina: I'm sure that came in real handy over the last 18 months or so.

[13:41] Cheryl Dennis: Yes. I still do, I've gotten to the point I do yoga every single day of my life, and I found that that helped navigate some of the turbulent waters that come along with what we do.

[13:53] Mary Dina: Are there any books or resources, podcasts, even that you have found helpful to you as you've um been working over, you know, specifically over the last 20 years?

[14:03] Cheryl Dennis: I like to read biographies of people who have done this before. That's what I found most helpful. Because number one, everybody's gone through a challenging time and everybody's come up with a creative solution, and like across the board, the you know, act one is a classic that I will read over and over and over and over and over, but I've read biographies of most actors that I admire and artists.

[14:25] Mary Dina: And yeah.

[14:26] Mary Dina: And then this is our final question and it's a play on the tagline for Chicken and Biscuits. How has this process fed your soul?

[14:35] Cheryl Dennis: There's such there was such joy in the show and it was so nice to be a part of something joyful after the past year and a half we've had. This show like it made people laugh. It was a wonderful I know I keep saying this over and over but it was a wonderful show to work on after the pandemic and the cast was joyous. It was and they were generous. It was just lovely. The whole thing was lovely.

[14:59] Mary Dina: Yeah, I'm really hoping that we see more comedies.

[15:03] Cheryl Dennis: Yeah.

[15:03] Mary Dina: Because I think the last we were talking with Tony in the last episode we were saying how there you know I feel like there was a lot of talk about that. Like we as an industry were kind of like coming out it's gonna be a lot of comedy. Like that's what we're gonna want to see but we haven't really seen that too much. So hopefully you know in the next installment of or the next season even of Broadway that we're able to see some more lighthearted comedies that bring just pure joy to everyone involved. Because like a well done Broadway comedy there is nothing in the world like it.

[15:33] Cheryl Dennis: Right.

[15:34] Mary Dina: Yeah. Well thank you so much for coming on here and and just to sidebar Mary about this series I'm so proud that we were able to showcase so many jobs in the theater in this series that we hadn't had at all on the podcast.

[15:47] Cheryl Dennis: Yeah.

[15:47] Cheryl Dennis: So that's really exciting for us um and our show.

[15:50] Mary Dina: So I can I mean, I personally, I love that you guys are doing this because there are so many people who work on a show who you never see, hear from or meet, and they genuinely love theater too. And it's it's all part of putting the same thing up. So I love I really love that you guys are doing it. It's so fantastic.

[16:05] Cheryl Dennis: I have to tell you, you guys are my first podcast. I was like, I don't want to talk to people on my screen. And I love Leslie. And she's like, no. I literally, before we got on there, I was like, so are these people nice, like for real?

[16:18] Mary Dina: I will show you the text.

[16:20] Cheryl Dennis: Hopefully she said yes. So I I love thank you so much. Like, I personally would like to thank you for doing this.

[16:26] Mary Dina: Oh I'm so glad.

[16:28] Mary Dina: Thanks everyone for listening to this episode of Page to Stage. To keep up with us, you can find us on Instagram and Facebook at Page2Stage Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we have other conversations with theater makers from Chicken and Biscuits. Check them out. Until next time. That's Brian. That's Mary. We'll see you later.