"As the summer performance season enters full swing, nature is invading outdoor stages around the country," Ellen Gamerman reports in The Wall Street Journal. (Art by Ross McDonald) "A group of wild turkeys started gobbling from stage right during a recent performance of Noël Coward’s “Private Lives” at the California Shakespeare Theater in Orinda, Calif. A bear ran across the lawn at the Jacob’s Pillow dance festival in Becket, Mass. Workers nervously kept an eye out for alligators that lurk around a venue used by the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C."There's more: "Some actors struggle to coexist with their natural surroundings. Theatre of the Big Bend, in Alpine, Texas, stages its outdoor shows near a natural spring on a hill dotted with cottonwood trees, scrub oak and prickly pear cactus. During a recent rehearsal, an actor spotted a scorpion just as the group was about to run through a dream sequence in a Spanish-English comedy. Amid screams, a cast member who’s from the area stomped over in his cowboy boots and squashed it."
And the Journal, of course, has a business angle: "Though attendance is down at some outdoor venues—crowds at the first summer performance at Tablerock Festival of Salado, in Texas, were down 17 percent compared with last year’s opening night—other events are seeing a spike in interest." (Read more)
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