Sorry, Rex Smith.
In the Broadway cast record of “My Fair Lady” a couple of spoken word lines are out of order; if I recall correctly
“Karpathy? That dreadful Hungarian? Was he there?” is said before "Thank goodness for Zoltan Karpathy. If it hadn’t been for him. I would’ve died of boredom. "
Should a cape get under foot? Sounds like it was too long.
At the Chicago Lyric Opera’s Magic Flute ~15 years ago in one of the final scenes in the garden, either Pamina or Papagena (I can’t remember the opera well enough) went down a slide while playing with the children. Her skirt/dress got caught at the top and ripped nearly the whole outfit off. She recovered relatively quickly and the audience and she were laughing quite heartily even while she kept singing- the funniest part was that she is using both hands to hold her costume together and people either the children or the other characters keep trying to hold her hands while dancing as they obviously didn’t see what happened- one little boy even tried to pull on her dress to get her attention. She was truly amazing as she didn’t miss a note or a beat.
One Christmas my mother and I took my young daughter to her first ballet, a local production of Tschaikovsky’s Nutcracker. We were happy to get seats near the front of the stage.
One of the ballerinas had failed to tend to her costume appearance in all possible dance positions and every time she kicked a string from her hygiene product was visible. It was distracting but could have gone unremarked by an audience too proud of our local dance troupe to snicker.
That possibility for dignity was violated by a little girl voice near the front asking in her outdoor voice, “Mommy, what’s that string?”
In the late 80’s I saw Sting in concert and he launched into one of the hits from The Police years - Every Breath You Take (I think). Anyway, the audience is singing along and Sting sings the wrong verse. He stops, laughs at himself, compliments the audience for knowing the song better than he does, then starts over and just kills it the second time around.
My sister saw Billy Joel in concert and said he did something similar when singing We Didn’t Start The Fire.
Oh this is fun.
When my church did *Godspell *in one performance the fog machine used during the arrest set off the fire alarm. Fortunately there were already alarms and sirens going off so the audience didn’t even notice anything was wrong.
I saw a high school production of *Into the Woods *where the cow Milky White was being pulled across stage and had a wheel fall off. Jack yelled “Milky White, are you OK?” and carried him (her?) off stage.
As a freshman we did an 1890’s melodrama called Love Rides the Rails. The hero asked the heroine for the lantern to signal the train, except the latern wasn’t there. The prop person noticed right away and slid it to them across the floor from off stage left. Being a comedy, the audience loved it; so we did it again the next day.
My senior year of high school we did Damn Yankeesand the guy who played the devil was was perfect. Part of his costume (not that he needed much, he already had a goatee and evil smile) was a contraption that let him snap his fingers and make sparks. One night he snapped his fingers and . . . nothing happened. He (rightfully) looked surprised and said “Oh no, my sparks!” Then he narrowed his eyes and said “I guess I need to do some more evil.”
Mistakes at Phantom of the Opera. Man, those “Phans” have a website for everything connected with the show.
I saw Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick in The Producers on Broadway and I remember a few people cracking into smiles they were desperately trying to hide at different points of the show.
i like that site. i can’t remember any mistakes during phantom the times i’ve seen it (17 at last count). there’s a lot listed on that site, but with the vast amount of performances that have played i think that’s a pretty decent track record.
i remembered one from one of my middle school shows- we were doing scenes from various musicals, and my class was doing bye bye birdie, which segued into the big finale which was a dance number from grease. so the dancers start their number but instead of hearing “we go together”, the song we were dancing to, we hear “and i would do anything for love…i’d run right into hell and back…” how meatloaf accidentally got cued up i have no idea, but we just kept going. hee.
All three times I’ve seen Billy Joel, he’s had a book of lyrics on his piano for just such an emergency.
Paul McCartney performed a set on MTV’s Unplugged several years ago. He started to play “We Can Work It Out,” and started with the wrong lyrics. He stopped the performance, stated that he screwed up, and said since it was so informal, they’d start again. You can see a clip here.
I have a Live cd of a Crowded House concert recorded in Birmingham in 2007. They are playing the intro to Something So Strong. But Neil Finn starts singing “Ice will melt …” (the first line to It’s Only Natural). He stops singing, the band keep playing, and Neil says “They’re all the same”, then starts back into the correct song. It cracks me up every time I hear it.
When I was a student, I was in the Student Review. It wasn’t very good, but one sketch was based on “The Professionals” (UK TV show). The Theme music played, and the actors ran on, waving toy pistols, and leaped over some furniture, before delivering their lines. On the first production night, one of the leads jumped up onto a desk that was just a bit further back on stage than in rehearsals, and jumped a bit higher than in the past, and slammed his head into an overhead beam with a thud. Damn near knocked himself out. He mumbled something about “who put that fucking beam there”, then got up and got on with the show. How he didn’t have a concussion I’ll never understand. He was much more restrained on the following nights.