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[0:00] Mo Brady: You're listening to The Ensemblist, the only podcast that shows you Broadway from the inside out. Welcome, I'm Mo Brady.

[0:12] Mo Brady: Hello, happy St. Patrick's Day. It is Tuesday, March 17th, and yesterday I got the chance to speak with Jane Bunting. She is a standby and dance captain for the Come From Away national tour. And yes, she told us how she found out that her tour, like many others, would be suspended, but also talking about what she's been doing in the time since then. Here's our conversation. Hi, would you introduce yourself and tell us where you are right now?

[0:41] Jane Bunting: My name is Jane Bunting, and I am in Astoria, Long Island City at the moment.

[0:47] Mo Brady: Okay, all right. And what has your job most recently been?

[0:52] Jane Bunting: So my job most recently has been, and I'm pretty sure I still have it, is the North American tour of Come From Away. I'm a dance captain and the standby.

[1:05] Mo Brady: So when was the last time you worked?

[1:08] Jane Bunting: The last time that I worked was last Thursday. We were in Dallas. We were in the middle of our first week of a two-week sit down there, and we had our unexpectedly our final show on Thursday evening.

[1:21] Mo Brady: Okay. And when did you find out that that was going to be your...?

[1:26] Jane Bunting: We had started to hear during the day that Broadway was on hold for a month and other tours were shutting down for a while, and we figured that ours was going to be just kind of a matter of time. And so we found out most definitely that that was happening after the show that evening.

[1:41] Mo Brady: Gosh, all right. Did the show on Thursday night feel normal? Was it a normal-sized house? Did the energy feel normal?

[1:48] Jane Bunting: No, it was actually not a normal-sized house. So I walked out into the house to watch because we did have a standby on that night, and I walked into the house and it was light. We've been playing a lot of bigger houses on the road, so for what we're used to, it was a bit smaller. And there was a bit of an interesting energy on stage. We had had actually a company meeting right before half hour to just kind of address what was going on, and we were told we're not canceled as of yet, but obviously this is an ongoing situation and we're finding out new information every hour. There are a lot of really difficult things about this that are unique to what we do, you know?

[2:27] Mo Brady: So I'm sure one of them was that you were working away from home. So if Thursday's your last show and you're in Astoria now, how and when did you get home?

[2:37] Jane Bunting: I flew back to New York on Saturday. So we found all of this out Thursday evening, and then basically what happened is that our incredible company management team made it happen for all of us to be able to just try to get out of there to wherever we needed to go the next day. And most of us left on Saturday at some point. Yeah, we basically were just told, go and pack up your trunks, take things with you that you feel like you're going to need. And then we all just kind of packed up our lives and then got on planes and went to where we were going to go without really any kind of knowledge of what was going to happen for sure moving forward.

[3:19] Mo Brady: Wow. Okay. What were the airports like when you flew on Saturday? For those of us who haven't been traveling?

[3:26] Jane Bunting: DFW was a ghost town. I have TSA PreCheck and I still got through security in record time, i.e. I was the only person. And my flight had, God, I think like maybe 15 people on it. But then when I landed at LaGuardia, it was just as busy as it usually is. So I think that the madness had maybe not necessarily started down in Texas where there aren't as many cases right now. But in LaGuardia, LaGuardia was not cute.

[4:00] Mo Brady: So you're back in New York. You've landed at LaGuardia. And do you get to go home?

[4:00] Jane Bunting: No. So because I'm technically a homeless touring person, I actually gave up my apartment in New York. I was living in Sunnyside and I gave my apartment up. My lease was up August 1st, 2018, because I knew that we were going to be going on the road and I knew that I would be on the road for probably longer than a year. So I looked around at a bunch of different options that I had staying in different boroughs. And I decided that this was going to be the best option for me just because I wanted to be closer to my stuff. And I also heard a rumor there was a possibility that they were going to be sequestering the boroughs. And I did not want to find myself in a situation where I was going to be unable to get to an airport depending on when the tour was going to go back out. So I just wanted to have that option just in case.

[4:47] Mo Brady: Yeah. So talk about both of those. The information that you think might be coming and the information that you actually have. What here at the beginning of the next week, do you know and have you heard rumors about?

[5:02] Jane Bunting: So what I know for sure, as far as my job goes, we are most definitely canceled this week and next week. So we were supposed to finish out our run in Dallas this week. And then next week, we were supposed to be in Naples.

[5:15] Mo Brady: Well, that would have been nice.

[5:18] Jane Bunting: Yeah, that would have been really grand. Instead, now I'm like, I have like minimal winter things. And I'm in New York. And I was really looking forward to sunshine as I'm a Gulf Coast baby. So we were supposed to be in Naples. And then that was all we were told from the company. What some of us have done is that we have started looking at the individual websites of each venue that we have an upcoming run at. So the week after Naples is West Palm. And the website, as of yesterday, said that we're still on. But the following week would be the first of a two-week run in Fort Lauderdale. And that week has been canceled. But that's not something that has been necessarily announced to us by the producers. So that's something that we have all kind of sleuthed.

[6:05] Jane Bunting: I am assuming that we're going to be off for longer than two weeks, especially hearing that the CDC has been recommending that there are no gatherings of more than 50 people, which obviously doing a Broadway tour, usually we do it to more than 50 people. Ideally, we do it to more than 50 people. So I'm assuming that it's going to be a while. And I am just trying to prepare for that as best as I can from being stocked up as possible where I'm staying to setting up a regimen every day so that I don't go absolutely insane.

[6:37] Mo Brady: Are you filing for unemployment? Are you not? What do you? How are you making? Are you making money?

[6:43] Jane Bunting: Great question. From what I do understand, we do have overages still coming in because those are hitting us, you know, a month after we play a city. And so I do know that I have an overage check coming in on Thursday. Otherwise, I mean, we don't know anything. We have absolutely no idea whether or not we're still going to be compensated, which I know is a very complicated situation. And I fortunately have been saving a lot over the last year and a half. So I'm not worried. But I also just don't know how long I'm not going to be able to go back to work and how much of my savings I'm going to have to dip into. I really have no idea.

[7:23] Mo Brady: Okay, so then we're so we're sort of entering this phase of no performing arts as we've known them because what we do is such a group activity. Are you even thinking about how to feed your creative soul right now? Are you just in emergency mode?

[7:41] Jane Bunting: I am trying to figure out a way to do that. So I have a beautiful guitar that has been sitting in my storage unit because it's just too big of a thing to take with me on the road. I'm planning on walking over to my storage unit this afternoon and just getting busting that baby out and just reteaching myself how to do that. I have a lot of friends that are, you know, offering as I'm sure you know, we all do in this community, which is amazing, offering a lot of digital content. I have some choreographer friends that are doing that I'm gonna try to learn routines. I'm gonna I have a girlfriend in the show who's in our band. And she has the idea of making a bunch of music videos of and she wants to include some choreography in them.

And she sent me a bunch of recordings and stuff. And so that's a project that I have an infinite amount of time to work on. So that's something that's gonna be really nice. I mean, I feel like I'm not gonna be able to handle this unprecedented stretch of time without figuring out a way to be creative. I just I will not survive. I will go nuts. It's just awesome. I know it's so it's really strange. It doesn't it the whole thing just doesn't make sense. And I and thanks for shining a light on what's happening to the touring community because we do have such a unique set of circumstances. Nobody really knows what's going to happen. I'm I'm scared. I have so many friends who were they don't have the luxury and the fallback of a of a consistent gig such as I do.

I know so many people that live hand to mouth. Obviously, we all do. People whose survival gigs just got ripped out from under them. Because so many people work in the service industry or the or the fitness industry, you know, and, and they just have no way of really generating income. And so I just I don't know what to do about that. And I hope that somebody figures out a way to deal with it.

[9:44] Mo Brady: Special thanks to Jane Bunting for sharing her stories with us today. The Ensemblist was produced today by me, Mo Brady. If you are looking for more episodes of podcasts, both Corona and non-Corona content, you can subscribe to us on Apple podcasts or on Spotify. You can also help us out two really easy ways. One is by leaving us a rating and review on Apple podcasts. And the other is by becoming one of our Patreon members. You can do that at patreon.com slash the Ensemblist and follow us on Instagram because things are changing all the time and we're sharing stories there too. Alright, thanks for listening guys until next time.