Neither of these were me: the first was a show I was involved in and the second was a show I was watching.
- My junior year in college, our spring opera was Summer and Smoke by Lee Hoiby. One of the scenes in the second act involved a trio with Alma (the lead) and two other women. It was perhaps a ten minute scene. Closing night, and Alma was in place for the scene. The lights came up, and she found herself totally alone. Unfortunately, it was an unconventional space and the orchestra and conductor were behind the stage; having no idea that anything was wrong, the conductor went ahead and started the scene. So the woman playing Alma (fortunately, a consummate performer who has gone on to a fairly successful career was forced to improvise the entire scene by herself. The previous scene had involved her clearly beginning to have some psychological problems, and ended with her scrabbling on the ground for pills, so she was able to play the whole thing as a sort of imagined conversation, helped along by the fact that she was losing her grip a little.
The chewing out her colleagues got was legendary.
- In April of 2000, I went to New York to see the Ring at the Met. Act II of* Die Walküre* ends with the death of Hunding, followed by some quiet music, followed by Wotan’s magnificent outburst of rage at Brünnhilde. Unfortunately, something went wrong backstage, and the curtain came down shortly after Hunding’s death. It remained down just long enough to completely cut off Wotan’s line. The Wotan was James Morris, one of the most important baritones in the world, and a man who has owned the role of Wotan since the '70s. I imagine the second intermission was not a pleasant time backstage.
Two days later, waiting for the beginning of Siegfried, we got the story from somebody who knew somebody on the crew. Apparently somebody was backstage on their cell phone, and the stage manager turned around to shush them, and unfortunately used the same gesture that he used for the curtain.
This one was me. Freshman year in college, I worked backstage at the campus theater. In addition to hosting campus events, the theater was also a road house that brought in acts from all over the world (the first show I worked was Stomp). One of those acts was Black Light Theater of Prague. This style of show involves actor/dancers dressed in bright clothes on a black set, with brightly lit props and set pieces transported by other actors (or, I suppose, manipulators) dressed in black, all lit by black light so that things appeared to float around on stage (the show was Peter Pan). It was all presented as ballet, and since everything had to be finely coordinated to maintain the illusion, it was critical that all the performers be able to hear the music clearly.
I was working sound. Before the show, as I was doing something else, the technical director asked somebody else to go turn on the equipment in the sound booth. When I arrived, I glanced at the stack of amplifiers and other equipment in the corner, saw that the lights were on, and figured that everything was in order. Big mistake.
The entire first act, the stage manager kept telling me that the performers were complaining that they couldn’t hear the monitors. So I kept turning them up. The complaints kept coming, so I kept cranking up the volume. Finally, I cranked the volume up near maximum, and asked the stage manager if that was better. “I think so,” he replied dubiously. A minute or so later, my boss appeared behind me, kneeled down at the bank of amplifiers and turned on the monitor amplifier that I had neglected to make sure was on. That in itself wasn’t a great idea, since I had cranked the volume all the way up, so the monitors suddenly blasted out everyone on stage.
It turned out that the person sent up before didn’t really know what she was doing. It was my fault for not double checking; it’s really the sound person’s responsibility to make sure that everything is in order. Nothing came of it; it’s pretty much par for the course that there are going to be mistakes in a theater with student workers (I mean, more than the mistakes that you normally expect in theater).
I have another fairly major backstage screw-up, but this is too long already. Another time.
