Wayside Playbills
Theatre playbills serve two purposes: the main one is to give information about the performance, names of people involved in creating the event, the names of the actors with their bios, and information about the technical staff. It could also contain information about upcoming performances. The second purpose is to provide space for advertisements for businesses and sponsors of the theatre, as well as supporting organizations.
The playbill for Wayside’s 1963 season is not in the traditional format. It is a twelve-page booklet beginning with a note of welcome written by Artistic Director, Larry Gleason. Following this welcome are the names and photos of each member of the acting company along with a short bio. It also contains the titles and performance dates of the season’s plays along with advertisements of local businesses.
One assumes that patrons attending a performance were each handed a copy of the season booklet into which a single page had been inserted that gave information about that particular performance, the cast, number of acts, names of the director and technical staff, and other information about the production.
The earliest example of these single-page inserts is for the production, Light up the Sky, that was performed July 9 – 14, 1963. The insert is a single sheet of paper giving names of the cast and production staff. Based on this single item, along with the similar format for the 1964 season, it is assumed that the playbills for the 1963 season were printed in a similar manner and slipped inside when the booklet was distributed to those attending.
This format was used for the 1964, 1965, and 1966 seasons. These single page items for these years were not professionally printed, but were prepared on a typewriter and reproduced by a mimeograph machine or a similar duplicating device. Examples of these single-page playbills can be found the Theatre Scrapbooks. Company booklets for the years 1963, 1964, and 1965 are included with the collection of playbills located in the Handley Library Archives.
The only other programs in this typed/mimeographed format are those for children’s shows or for post-season productions. Based upon playbills in the Archives, programs from 1966 to 2013 were professionally printed.
During the Slavet years, the size of the playbill became slightly larger and expanded from being the season booklet into which the single page was inserted into a booklet containing thirty or forty pages. This permitted the inclusion of additional information about the theatre, bios of company and staff members, information of upcoming events, as well as advertisements for local businesses.
One source writes that the playbills for 1979 were “one sheet” of paper, not the traditional book format. Playbills for “1980, 81 and 82 were books with inserts.” (Lynch. Email. 11 June 2021).
By 1987, the booklet gave Information for the current production on the inside back cover. In some of these playbills, there was a brief column that gave information on the activities of actors who had previously worked at Wayside.
This format of the playbill remained fairly constant until 1991 when the size of was increased slightly to 5 ½ x 8 ½ inches. The size increased again in 1999 to that of 6 x 9 inches. This remained the standard size for several years.
The size of the playbills increased again for the 2011 season to 8 ¼ x 11 inches making it quite a hefty booklet and remained that size until the theatre closed in 2013. It is not quite clear the reason for this larger format - - was it because it might be easier to read; or was it more convenient for the business responsible for providing the programs as part of their contract? Or, was it thought by the theatre leadership that a larger size was better for the patrons? Regardless of the reason, the playbills for those years were ungainly documents to deal with.
Although an attempt has been made to compile a complete collection of Wayside’s playbills, there are several gaps. A separate chart lists the playbills by year that have been collected and are housed in the Archives of the Handley Library, Winchester, Virginia.