Stagehand dies of cardiac arrest backstage at the musical
Boy, someone stubs their toe at Spiderman and it’s front page news, but this didn’t get much press at all.
And, no, the show did not go on.
ah, welcome to the insular world of the theater techie. we get no respect or recognition - except by other techies.
we do what we do because we love the art and science of stagecraft. it is what it is: people just don’t care about the behind the scenes stuff as much as they do about what’s happening ***on ***stage. yet without us, there ain’t no show.
i’m not at all surprised the death didn’t get much press. frankly, i am surprised the show didn’t go on. makes me wonder if there are other issues connected to that production.
I was surprised that they cancelled the performance. Can anyone shed light on why they would have done that?
Not to be crass or insensitive about the poor fellow’s death, but it’s not like the star of the show keeled over just before the curtain rose.
I would have expected the performance to go on because, aside from the whole “the show must go on!” tradition, it must be expensive to cancel and I don’t see why it couldn’t go on without the stagehand.
AIUI, he died right before the show was to start, even if they wanted to continue, there were going to be police investigating. You can’t have a show going while police are backstage. I presume if he had died earlier in the day, and the police had come and gone, the show would have been up on schedule.
Since the death appears to be unrelated to anything going on within the show, it’s not really that newsworthy, a young man died of a drug overdose.
My wife was at the matinee that day as part of a summer work function (she said it was a good show and Radcliffe did a fine job). She just about popped when I sent her the headline the next morning - obviously there was no indication of anything amiss in the afternoon…
Sadly, Law & Order: Criminal Intent is ending and Law & Order already ended, so I don’t expect to see the ripped-from-the-headlines version on TV anytime soon.
I went to a forgettable show at a small theater in Kansas City fifteen or so years ago. My then-girlfriend was a friend of the theater owner, so on departing we stopped on our way out to thank her for comping us in. The owner asked us what we thought of the performance, so we both lied and said “It was great!” She responded with some relief: “Good, that was the understudy playing the lead. Our lead actor died this afternoon.”
It was an awkward situation so I didn’t press for details. It’s possible that the lead had been lingering in bed for weeks and just happened to expire that day, but her demeanor implied that he bit it suddenly during rehearsal. And they went right on with the show.
Unless he was the only guy who knew how to raise the curtain.
Don’t be sad, just catch a rerun of the June 19 episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent:
Now I wonder where that was ripped from. 
Heh. The weirdest thing about that episode was that they explicitly mentioned both Julie Taymor & Spider-Man in the episode! So it was clearly supposed to be Spider-Man… except in the show’s universe the Spider-Man musical also exists.
That’s actually quite typical of the Law & Order franchise. If the headline is high profile enough, they will mention it to make the explicit connection, and also probably to try to fend off lawsuits (“no one could mistake the show depicted for Spider-Man; we made it clear that Spider-Man is a separate show.”) I know that they have done this in other episodes, sometimes naming a celebrity on whom the case is based and pointing out differences or similarities.