“Steve McAlphabet’s Wandering Soul Road Show” is bringing an afternoon of entertainment to the Historic Masonic Theater in Clifton Forge, Virginia on August 26, 2023 at 2 p.m. The show includes an interactive musical portion called The Cowboy Cabaret, a screening of the documentary The Road To Will about last year’s 10,500 motorcycle tour exploring the legacy of Will Rogers, and a performance of Get The Bunk Out, based on Rogers’ political humor.
The creator of the show, Steve McAllister, was first cast in a 2017 community theater production of The Will Rogers Follies in Sarasota, Florida. Before the end of the run, McAllister had a first draft of a one-man performance based on what Will Rogers said that didn’t make it into the Tony Award-winning musical. McAllister’s first version of the performance, Will Rogers Revived, won the Humorist Award at the 2018 Sarasolo Festival.
“Considering that Will Rogers was the only person in history to be invited to speak at both the Democratic and Republican conventions in the same year,” McAllister explains, “I think it’s a good time for America to remember what he had to say.” The same year Rogers spoke at both political conventions, Life magazine nominated them as the 1928 presidential candidate for their Anti Bunk Party, in the hopes of “getting the bunk out of politics”.
The August 26 performance will be the premiere of The Road To Will film and is part of another motorcycle tour from Florida to Maine in search of other theaters in which to share the show. McAllister is also celebrating the recent publication of his tenth book, a coloring book called A Group of Critters, based on his poem about the various collective nouns used to describe groups of animals.
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