During a preview of The Magic Show (damn, I am old) a performer who was runing out to take his bows ran right into a pole and knocked himself out. Another actor just pulled the body off stage.
There was a mistake when I saw Dead Can Dance perform several years back - nothing too severe, though. Lisa came in too early on one of her vocal lines, stopped, and looked really embarrassed. The song continued on as normal after that.
Expectedly, the live album they released of this show omits that moment.
A performance of the song One from the revival of A Chorus Line was televised live on CBS this Morning during Tony Week. Charlotte d’Amboise, who is a consummate professional and was nomiated for a Tony for playing Cassie, forgot they cut the last verse and started to sing and kick.
Totally embarassment.
If you are used to doing it one way, it must be difficult to switch off the automatic pilot. When the “Spring Awakening” cast performed a medley from the show on the Tonys that year they had to change the lyrics of one song and they simply covered their mouths and sang nothing every time they got to the word ‘fucked’ in the song “Totally Fucked”. A while later, they did another medley on the “Today” show and changed it to ‘stuck’ in all instances. In each case the performers did the changes without a hitch, but it must have made the producers of the TV broadcasts a little nervous.
Not real funny, but I was the villain in a meller-drammer once and was supposed to offer a semi-conscious heroine a drink of whisky from a pint bottle, which for safety’s sake was not to be in my pocket until that scene.
Perfect the first night, but the second night I forgot to pocket it and vamped around it (“If only I had some whisky–!!”)and the heroine (with closed eyes) perfectly covered for me offering a hypothetical drink.
But–
The director was just livid, like I was the stupidest guy on earth, and had a big meeting about it later that night (in which I was the object of his rage–and it was entirely my mistake) and every night for two weeks thereafter *he was standing by the prop table to watch me *put the bottle in my pocket.
It actually helped me because it made me grouchy and in-character but that was a two-week nightmare backstage with him glowering at me at the prop table just before that scene.
I saw Grease with Rex Harrison. During the scene where they are at the drive-in, he fumbles and drops the ring. Since it’s a fake car with no bottom, he has to get out of the car and dig around underneath it to find the ring, get back in the car, and give Sandy the ring.
The casting director was either a genius or a maniac.
My grandfather once took me to an otherwise flawless performance of “A Streetcar Named Desire” in which the actress playing Blanche Dubois mixed up the explanation of her name, saying “Blanche” meant “woods” and “bois” meant “white.”
Later on in the play, there’s a scene where Blanche asks a young man for a light for her cigarette, and it takes him several tries because the lighter is “temperamental.” At that point in the performance, my grandfather leaned over and whispered that the actors were adlibbing to cover for the bad lighter. Years later, I read the play – sorry, Grandpa, that part was scripted.
So, she is successful enough that she no longer has to play vampire towns…
Not precisely a flub, but we were lucky enough to see Wicked in its pre-Broadway run-up in San Francisco. (I’m not normally here or there about such things, but I am deeply tickled to be in the first few thousand to have seen that show.)
At the time, Kristin Chenowith (the original Glinda) had injured her neck and was wearing a kelly collar throughout the performance - it was a bit glitzed up but still your basic white neck brace. Before the performance, the stage manager explained that she had been injured and refused to take any more time off from the performances (applause), but they had adjusted a few scenes to suit her immobility.
I don’t know what else they changed, because it was nearly ten years before I saw the production again in NYC, but at one point Elphaba leaps for Glinda, intending to grab her by the throat. She stopped inches away, and Glinda gave a very slow, deliberate “ah-ah-ah!” while wagging her finger in Idina Menzel’s face. The audience blew the roof off.
I was once in a production of South Pacific. Just as we were finishing the last notes of “There is Nothing Like a Dame,” the circuit breaker popped, plunging everyone into darkness.
No one notices; the timing was such that they probably thought there was a blackout planned at that point.
I saw Nice Work If You Can Get It just last weekend, and Matthew Broderick flubbed one of his lines - he came in with it too early, before the other actor had said her part. His mike was off and he just laughed it off and repeated it in the proper place.
There’s a recording of Elvis where he cracked himself up singing “Lonesome Tonight.”
For a personal example, in high school we did Androcles and the Lion and Candida and I was already in Androcles, but the person who was playing Eugene in Candida was dumped/quit about a week before we opened and I was chosen to replace him so I had to scramble to learn the role. Fortunately Eugene is a small part but I flubbed something the first night – I said “large” for some reason where it wasn’t needed, then realized I screwed up the line, looked into the audience and saw glazed eyes, quickly decided that I just had to fix that, and then added that it actually wasn’t large. I got a few chuckles from the audience when they figured it out but “large” was now stuck in my mind and I ended up adding it again the next night saying that someone had the “largest” consternation.
A few years ago, back during its “we’re back for a bit” run on Broadway, my wife and I took our moms to see the Producers with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick.
It was St. Patrick’s Day, and at the end of the show, when the cops come in to arrest Bialystock and Bloom, the actor playing the cop said his lines in a very, very thick Irish accent. You could tell it wasn’t normal because Nathan and Matthew both kind of froze and had to recover quickly. Nathan said his next couple lines also in a fake Irish accent, throwing things off further.
Suffice to say, it was hilarious.
This goes way back, way back to the 50s. A famous fading actor, Sabu, was starring in a show featuring him as a heroic character who is called upon to shoot and kill another character. The gun doesn’t fire so Sabu shouts “bang.” (doesn’t fool anyone). He grabs a knife from his belt. The knife is clearly rubber and wobbles in his hand. The two actors fight and Sabu spots the butler call rope and decides to drag the other actor to that and ad lib strangling him with that. Unfortunately as Sabu jerks it down a curtain rod comes crashing down on his own head stunning him. He comes to in time to fakily strangle the other actor who by this time is laughing through his death throes. The audience is also laughing and are literally rolling in the aisles while Sabu finishes his lines.
The only audience member not laughing was my mother who had such a crush on the actor.
Guns and amateur performances are a sure recipe for memorable evenings. I was at a high school production where character A pulled the trigger and character B fell down, even though there was no shot. Everyone could hear the stagehand furiously clicking the starter’s pistol THREE TIMES before he remembered the hammer had to be cocked. By the time the gun went off character A had already dropped his hand to his side and character B was curled up on the floor, laughing.
I was in the chorus of a performance of Kiss Me Kate, where the two Gangsters were by far the best and most experienced actors in the cast. During the Act I finale, the performers are supposed to be distracted by the chirping of a bird in the rafters, which the Gangsters then shoot. The bird chirped, the Gangster pulled the trigger, and nothing happened. Gangster looked at the other Gangster and adlibbed “Gimme your knife.” The bird then fell out of the rafters and the Gangster deadpanned “heart attack.”
In our (big regional theater production that ran 140 performances) R&J last year, we had the archetypal screw-up of all English-language theater: Romeo forgot to grab his knife from the prop table when he went onstage to kill himself in Juliet’s tomb. Damn.
Ok, so mine was a marionette show. Put on by us Big Kids at our school. We made our own marionettes using light bulbs and paper mache for the heads.
Production values were not high.
I was in charge of the sound portion of the dark & stormy night skit. I had a record player that played thunder storm sounds. I also had a few of those gunpowder-in-a-paper-wrapper things (I can’t remember what they were called) that you would throw to make a banging sound for the shots ringing out in the night, and a tall metal trash can in which to throw them. (If you’re wondering about the light portion of the dark & stormy night skit, that was a friend of mine. She turned the gym lights on and off.)
I started the record on cue. My friend flipped the light switches on cue. I tensed, waiting for the line that would mean I should throw the gunpowder-in-a-paper-wrapper things. The line came, I threw, nothing happened. Short pause. I snatched up the rest of the gunpowder-in-a-paper-wrapper things, threw them, nothing happened. My classmates holding the light bulb head marionettes began looking over their shoulders nervously. I tried to convey to them my plight. Time seemed to slow down. Finally one brave person decided to ab lib. “Bang bang,” she said, without much conviction. That did it. The skit resumed, and continued to its triumphant end.
Further investigation showed that my endless moment of mortification was caused by someone actually having put trash in my trash can prop, creating a cushion that kept the gunpowder things from breaking apart properly. Clearly, I was surrounded by idiots.
<gasp> Number two!
Huh. Similar to the revival of Gypsy. Patti Lupone was having feet problems and so they announced she would be doing the who play in flats rather than heels. Fun.
At the Broadway revival of Cyrano de Bergerac a few years ago with Kevin Kline, Jennifer Garner (Roxane) went sprawling across the stage when she came out to take her bows. It wasn’t during the performance, but I felt bad for her. Kline hopped over the (flat) spot where she’d tripped when he came out for his bows a moment later.