The show must go on
February 25, 2016 10:55 AM Subscribe
This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- frimble
I love that someone's head is blocking a lot of the action because you get that sweet payoff of a triumphant hand rising from the wreckage.
posted by phunniemee at 11:05 AM on February 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by phunniemee at 11:05 AM on February 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
In Puccini's Tosca, a character jumps off a high stone wall to their demise. To increase the dramatic effect and offer safety to the performer, the wall is very high, so a trampoline was placed out of sight, behind the stage wall. Unfortunately, one night, this character makes their scripted leap and ends up bouncing back into sight, almost back to where they started.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 11:44 AM on February 25, 2016 [6 favorites]
posted by a lungful of dragon at 11:44 AM on February 25, 2016 [6 favorites]
Wow, he just owned that. Amazing!
I had an actor in a production of "Noises Off" that I directed, break her toe early in Act III. She told nobody about it, and found a reason to hop around on one foot for most of the show, which the audience found hilarious, and we all thought was a bit over-the-top to improvise, until right after curtain call, when she tearfully asked if someone would drive her to Urgent Care.
posted by xingcat at 12:11 PM on February 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
I had an actor in a production of "Noises Off" that I directed, break her toe early in Act III. She told nobody about it, and found a reason to hop around on one foot for most of the show, which the audience found hilarious, and we all thought was a bit over-the-top to improvise, until right after curtain call, when she tearfully asked if someone would drive her to Urgent Care.
posted by xingcat at 12:11 PM on February 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
"You know, 'Break a leg' is just a figure of speech"
posted by 445supermag at 12:39 PM on February 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by 445supermag at 12:39 PM on February 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
I was in the theater club in college, and can remember two incidents like this. The first - I was supposed to be knocked off a high platform by another performer. Some dorm mattresses were placed on the stage below me to cushion my fall. I am pushed, rotate backwards, land cleanly across my shoulders... and then bounce back up and keep rotating, to make a second and final landing on the hard stage floor with the crown of my head.
The second - unbeknownst to anyone, a fellow performer had the unfortunate timing to start passing a kidney stone in the middle of a performance. He powered through the whole show, but almost lost it when, while lying in a bed, I had to drop a suitcase on him. I had no idea anything was wrong until curtain when he literally could not bend over to take a bow. I still kind of feel bad about that one.
posted by backseatpilot at 1:21 PM on February 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
The second - unbeknownst to anyone, a fellow performer had the unfortunate timing to start passing a kidney stone in the middle of a performance. He powered through the whole show, but almost lost it when, while lying in a bed, I had to drop a suitcase on him. I had no idea anything was wrong until curtain when he literally could not bend over to take a bow. I still kind of feel bad about that one.
posted by backseatpilot at 1:21 PM on February 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
Alexander Frankel: "It was originally planned that I would stand on the table for the end of the duet, but the chair had other plans… It all happened in slow motion, and once I realized I wasn’t going to get splinters in my ass I remembered that I had to SING.” He's on Twitter and Facebook, too.
posted by orthicon halo at 1:32 PM on February 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by orthicon halo at 1:32 PM on February 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
Talk about lowering the tenor of a performance...
posted by Devonian at 4:08 PM on February 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Devonian at 4:08 PM on February 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
I think the chair was only rated for tenor twenty pounds.
posted by Chuffy at 4:21 PM on February 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by Chuffy at 4:21 PM on February 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
Really, who thought that chair was the right choice for that particular function? Anybody should have seen that coming. What the heck?
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 5:30 PM on February 25, 2016
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 5:30 PM on February 25, 2016
College production of "Taming of the Shrew" (questionable choice, I know, but hey, it was Georgia Tech). Actress playing Katherine (a lovely girl who later completed a MD/Ph.D. program somewhere) was totally sick. She threw up behind a small piece of scenery early in one of her first scenes -- I think when she first gets home with Petrucchio. The show went on and was as fun as it always was, just with a small pile of yuck hidden on stage.
posted by amtho at 8:12 PM on February 25, 2016
posted by amtho at 8:12 PM on February 25, 2016
Alright.
In Year 10, 15-year-old-me was cast as Leonato in the school production of Much Ado About Nothing. Our final dress rehearsal was an open preview for kids from other high schools, and our audience was packed with giggling teenagers who didn't really want to be there. This was a period in my life when I got severe migraine, often stress induced, and naturally I get an absolute stonker about 20 minutes before beginners. The works, with blinding pain, slurred speech, nausea and perceptual difficulties. Immediately, I go to the director (one of the English & Drama staff) and tell him there's a serious problem and I can't possibly go on.
His expert opinion is that I'm just trying to get out of doing it, ruining the show for everyone, because of nerves. So we go ahead.
I manage to hold it together for most of the first half - Leonato's not much of a character, a few big speeches but not much actual stage time - and despite increasing pain from the lights shining in my eyes and some difficulty with my lines, it's not really anything more than a bad high school show.
Until Act 3, Scene 5, an otherwise unremarkable scene that would not ordinarily remain embedded in the viewer's memory for all time. The terrible nausea had been growing all afternoon, and I had snuck out of the theatre several times to puke noisily in the nearest bin. Unfortunately, there was no escaping it this time. I was pretty delirious, but I think I made it to around line 40 "Indeed, neighbour, he comes too.." with the non-canonical stage direction A massive bolt of watery puke launches itself from LEONATO's face, spattering everything in sight.
To his credit, the kid playing Dogberry got out the following line, "Gifts that God gives" with glorious deadpan.
Utter chaos ensues, as I'm staggering around trying to clean things up, Dogberry and Verges are trying to finish the scene, there's pandemonium in the audience with gales of laughter and sympathy retching, when the poor kid playing the Messenger comes on, declares "Master Dogberry, thy stench hath made Lord Leonato sick!" and hauls me offstage to a horrified director.
I honestly can't remember much after that: I think someone read in my lines for the rest of the show. But I like to think that for five or six hundred private school kids of the mid-90s, Much Ado About Nothing was never, ever the same...
posted by prismatic7 at 9:52 PM on February 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
In Year 10, 15-year-old-me was cast as Leonato in the school production of Much Ado About Nothing. Our final dress rehearsal was an open preview for kids from other high schools, and our audience was packed with giggling teenagers who didn't really want to be there. This was a period in my life when I got severe migraine, often stress induced, and naturally I get an absolute stonker about 20 minutes before beginners. The works, with blinding pain, slurred speech, nausea and perceptual difficulties. Immediately, I go to the director (one of the English & Drama staff) and tell him there's a serious problem and I can't possibly go on.
His expert opinion is that I'm just trying to get out of doing it, ruining the show for everyone, because of nerves. So we go ahead.
I manage to hold it together for most of the first half - Leonato's not much of a character, a few big speeches but not much actual stage time - and despite increasing pain from the lights shining in my eyes and some difficulty with my lines, it's not really anything more than a bad high school show.
Until Act 3, Scene 5, an otherwise unremarkable scene that would not ordinarily remain embedded in the viewer's memory for all time. The terrible nausea had been growing all afternoon, and I had snuck out of the theatre several times to puke noisily in the nearest bin. Unfortunately, there was no escaping it this time. I was pretty delirious, but I think I made it to around line 40 "Indeed, neighbour, he comes too.." with the non-canonical stage direction A massive bolt of watery puke launches itself from LEONATO's face, spattering everything in sight.
To his credit, the kid playing Dogberry got out the following line, "Gifts that God gives" with glorious deadpan.
Utter chaos ensues, as I'm staggering around trying to clean things up, Dogberry and Verges are trying to finish the scene, there's pandemonium in the audience with gales of laughter and sympathy retching, when the poor kid playing the Messenger comes on, declares "Master Dogberry, thy stench hath made Lord Leonato sick!" and hauls me offstage to a horrified director.
I honestly can't remember much after that: I think someone read in my lines for the rest of the show. But I like to think that for five or six hundred private school kids of the mid-90s, Much Ado About Nothing was never, ever the same...
posted by prismatic7 at 9:52 PM on February 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
What a pro!
That's tenors for you. My dad loved to tell the story when a whole bunch of them was placed on a big table, in order to stick out over the rest of the choir, in a church performance of one of J.S. Bach's passions.
At some moment, still during the opening piece, the table gave way, parallelogramming sideways to a luxuriously splintering and cracking soundtrack. The assorted tenors vanished, slow motion style, behind the altos. One of them, who's normal job was at the opera, kept singing during the descent.
(My dad was playing the flute on that occasion, which is a rather difficult thing to do when you can see an entire audience trying not to laugh).
posted by Namlit at 4:19 AM on February 26, 2016 [1 favorite]
That's tenors for you. My dad loved to tell the story when a whole bunch of them was placed on a big table, in order to stick out over the rest of the choir, in a church performance of one of J.S. Bach's passions.
At some moment, still during the opening piece, the table gave way, parallelogramming sideways to a luxuriously splintering and cracking soundtrack. The assorted tenors vanished, slow motion style, behind the altos. One of them, who's normal job was at the opera, kept singing during the descent.
(My dad was playing the flute on that occasion, which is a rather difficult thing to do when you can see an entire audience trying not to laugh).
posted by Namlit at 4:19 AM on February 26, 2016 [1 favorite]
This is great but please don't record theatre productions on your fucking phone camera. You are not a secret ninja, you are not being subtle, the light from the screen is not dim enough to be unnoticeable, stop it.
posted by fight or flight at 5:27 AM on February 26, 2016
posted by fight or flight at 5:27 AM on February 26, 2016
I have been there.
By the way, the other (likely apocryphal) story about Tosca (see above) is this: There was a production that included a number of supers (i.e., extras) playing guards. They hadn't had sufficient rehearsal, and therefore hadn't had the opportunity to rehearse the final scene with the guards before opening night. The guards are basically supposed to follow Tosca onstage and then onto the parapet, where she then takes her final leap off the roof to her death, so the director said, "Just follow Tosca."
So, when the scene came, the guards followed Tosca onstage, they followed Tosca up to the parapet and, when the moment came, they shrugged and leaped off the roof after her.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 8:25 AM on February 26, 2016 [1 favorite]
By the way, the other (likely apocryphal) story about Tosca (see above) is this: There was a production that included a number of supers (i.e., extras) playing guards. They hadn't had sufficient rehearsal, and therefore hadn't had the opportunity to rehearse the final scene with the guards before opening night. The guards are basically supposed to follow Tosca onstage and then onto the parapet, where she then takes her final leap off the roof to her death, so the director said, "Just follow Tosca."
So, when the scene came, the guards followed Tosca onstage, they followed Tosca up to the parapet and, when the moment came, they shrugged and leaped off the roof after her.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 8:25 AM on February 26, 2016 [1 favorite]
Sixteen years ago now, I was cast as the Wolf/Woodsman in Seymour Barab's opera of "Little Red Riding Hood" in a summer program. The stage directions involve that performer coming on stage in street clothes, putting on makeup and costume protesting all the while about how he just can't go on, and then going straight into the first musical number.
I was also on (at that point) my third nasal corticosteroid, promised to be more gentle than the previously-promised "more gentle" one. Despite that promise, I had inevitably started getting Unstoppable Nosebleeds just like with the previous two steroids, and had, in fact, stopped using said steroid three days before a guest performance in a museum.
You can see where this is going. Turns out the show can't actually go on if you've got a gusher about to ruin your costume. I had to excuse myself, run out of the house past the audience, plug my nose while the poor accompanist improvised and played show tunes for about ten minutes, and then finally return once the bleeding stopped. We started over at the top.
Note this beat my previous Worst Performance Ever (freshman year of high school) when I stepped on a nail in the guys' dressing room during a costume change and thus had every girl in the performance coming in to see how I was doing, while I was still sitting in my tighty-whities. (Also: high school set crew left wood in the dressing room with nails sticking out of it, so … great job guys).
posted by fedward at 12:39 PM on February 26, 2016
I was also on (at that point) my third nasal corticosteroid, promised to be more gentle than the previously-promised "more gentle" one. Despite that promise, I had inevitably started getting Unstoppable Nosebleeds just like with the previous two steroids, and had, in fact, stopped using said steroid three days before a guest performance in a museum.
You can see where this is going. Turns out the show can't actually go on if you've got a gusher about to ruin your costume. I had to excuse myself, run out of the house past the audience, plug my nose while the poor accompanist improvised and played show tunes for about ten minutes, and then finally return once the bleeding stopped. We started over at the top.
Note this beat my previous Worst Performance Ever (freshman year of high school) when I stepped on a nail in the guys' dressing room during a costume change and thus had every girl in the performance coming in to see how I was doing, while I was still sitting in my tighty-whities. (Also: high school set crew left wood in the dressing room with nails sticking out of it, so … great job guys).
posted by fedward at 12:39 PM on February 26, 2016
When I was in high school, one of the junior theater classes did Little Luncheonette of Terror and near the beginning, they would turn down the lights and shake the sets to herald the arrival of Mongo from the center of the Earth. One night, they shook a little too hard, knocked a prop glass off a shelf and it fell down where Mongo was crouching waiting to enter. She cut her hand on the glass, grabbed a napkin off the set to hold, finished out a 10 minute scene, gave her costume to the person who played the same role on alternating nights, and went to the hospital for stitches.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:39 AM on February 27, 2016
posted by jacquilynne at 7:39 AM on February 27, 2016
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posted by NordyneDefenceDynamics at 10:58 AM on February 25, 2016 [1 favorite]