Shadowbox To Perform Back to the Garden At Schiller Park Amphitheatre 8/1

This Sunday, August 1st, Shadowbox will be performing their immensely popular musical Back to the Garden outside in the Schiller Park Amphitheatre. The 8pm performance is free to the public with donations being accepted to benefit Actor's Theatre. One of the things that has made this original, documentary musical about the 1969 Woodstock music festival is director Stev Guyer's attention to detail and authenticity. In fact, the authenticity of the original experience is something Shadowbox hopes to heighten with this outdoor version of the show and one aspect of this came from a rather unexpected source.

"We'll be using the original toilets!" laughs Guyer, "Well, okay, not the original units, but it's the same company." During their preparation for the upcoming outdoor event, Shadowbox contacted local company Rent-A-John for additional sanitation and was met with an amazingly serendipitous piece of information: not only did the family-owned business (then called "Johnny On The Spot") provide units and service for the first Woodstock but the family got to come along for the ride.

"Portable Sanitation is more or less a seasonal business," says Cassie Reynolds, eldest daughter of Bill and Barbara Reynolds who started the business in the 1950s, "So tagging along with Dad was kind of like our family's summer vacation." These "vacations" consisted of company owner Bill Reynolds, his wife, Barbara, and their four children, Cassie, Bobbie and twins Jackie and Bill Jr. While the family of six did get to attend many historic events such as Pope John Paul II's visit to Washington DC in 1979, two Olympic Games in Montreal and Lake Placid, NY and Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 march in DC, the Woodstock festival sticks out in the now-grown children's minds as one of the most awe-inspiring.
"I remember driving up over a hill and saying, ‘What is that?'", reminisces Bill Jr., only eight years old at the time, "And Dad said, ‘That's people.' And yeah, there were just...people as far the eye could see." The Reynolds were given several helpful warnings as they made their way into the festival, one of them being that it would be a very long time before they would be able to get out. Bill Sr. was also warned that he should avoid going near the stage if he wanted to shield his children from any of the historically rampant drug usage. "We could hear all the music," says Bobbie who had been eleven that summer, "but we wandered most of the time, so we didn't get to see any of them." The kids did, however, have a colorful encounter with rock star Janis Joplin in the lobby of the nearby Holiday Inn. "I think there weren't enough rooms for her people or something," ponders Cassie, then thirteen, "Whatever it was, she was mad. She just threw a tantrum, yelling all kinds of things at the staff. Mom didn't have enough hands to cover all of our ears."

All in all, the main impression upon the children was one of peace and togetherness. Once the infamous rain began to fall, the Reynolds climbed under a semi trailer for shelter and watched as the concert goers passed around a bar of soap and showered in nature. "All the kids were so kind," says Cassie, "We were all just fine."

So, when you come to see Back to the Garden this Sunday at Schiller Park and you have to make a quick duck over to the facilities in the middle of the show, don't hold your nose while you're in there. That's just the smell of history, passed down with peace and love from one family to another.