Not wanting to hijack this thread, I thought I’d opt for a discussion on the most memorable (preferably amusing) experiences in theater going (movie, play, opera, concert) that had nothing to do with the performance.
For starters.
My sister and I were standing in line to buy tickets for Titanic. I had read A Night to Remember when I was 10 years old (way back when Raise the Titanic came out), and was getting ready for a total geek-out experience. So I was telling my sister about the quality of the special effects in some of the preview footage, especially as the ship is sinking. Two teenage girls standing in front of us in line turn around and stare at me in wide-eyed shock. In unison, they say “it SINKS?”
I was at an outdoor Shakespeare production, in the grove right next to the duck pond on campus, when the performance was interrupted by an amorous male mallard chasing a female across the stage. Coincidentally, it was just as one of the characters was going into one of Will’s monologues about how stupid people act when they’re in love. The line was originally “They’re as bad as a pair of sheep”, or something of that sort, which got ad-libbed into “They’re as bad as a pair of ducks”.
In many G&S groups, it’s customary to end a run with a “hack night.” That is, actors, musicians, and tech crew get to play practical jokes on each other during the performance. These shows usually sell out.
When doing a production of Yeoman years ago, we decided not to do a hack night. That didn’t stop a few actors from getting in a few minor hacks, though.
A bit about the plot: Wilfred the gaoler loves Phoebe. Phoebe detests Wilfred. The man that Phoebe loves is locked in the Tower of London. She intends to break him out, so she faux-seduces Wilfred long enough to grab his ring of keys.
Normally, our Wilfred hung his key ring on the side of his belt. During the last performance, though, he hung it right in front. Hanging down right in front of his junk. Phoebe had no choice but to do a crotch-grab if she wanted the plot to move along. Those of us in the pit stared agape, wondering if what we were seeing was really happening.
We usually catch a Cleveland Orchestra concert or two at Blossom Music Center during the summer, and it was very amusing one evening to watch Jahja Ling repeatedly dodge a big brown bat that was swooping around in the pavilion.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Fellowship of the Ring. I tend to like big, 70-mm epic scope movies, and this one just floored me, leaving me slumped in my seat afterwards basking in the awesomeness of it all. The guy in front of me, on the other hand, got to his feet and bellowed “So they failed. Well THAT sucked.” The buddy he was with gently pointed out that this film was only the first of three. Unmollified, the guy continued his tirade. “So I have to wait TWO YEARS to find out how it ends? Fuck that!”
I took my parents to a Discworld theatre play (jolly good too).
They hadn’t read the books, but wanted to share my interests. So before curtain-up, I gave them an introduction, explaining about how the Unseen University Librarian was an Orang-Utan and so on.
In the middle of this, the chap behind me leaned forward and said “Sorry to interrupt, but these people haven’t read any of the books?!”
Then he blushed furiously :o and apologised (well, we were all English!)
We had two hacks like this on the final night of my high school performance of Oaklahoma. In the scene where Ado Annie kisses Ali and Will walks in on them, Will purposely walked in late. Annie looks over Ali’s shoulder, doesn’t see Will, and has no choice but to go back to kissing Ali while she waits. Ali was very confused. At the end when Ali congratulates Will on the wedding, he clapped him on the back so hard he nearly knocked him into the pit.
The other one was simpler - one of the clarinets found the raunchiest magazine he could lay hands on, and taped the centerfold to the last page of the conductor’s score. He turned the page, slammed the thing closed, and conducted the finale from memory while turning pink.
After viewing Sunset Boulevard on Broadway, we walked out of the theater and various cast members and such were stationed around the area raising money for for some charity (I think it was the AIDS one).
One particular person loudly announced a one dollar “fee” for use of the escalator. I admired his creativity–while choosing not to pay said fee on the grounds that I did not use the escalator ( I took the stairs).
A movie is playing, and onscreen is a zipper being unzipped. A girl in the audience says, just loud enough for most to hear “You know I heard **that **before”, followed by a roar of laughter.
Mine: In college, student organizations would rent halls and show porn at midnight to raise funds. At one of these events, a male actor was pounding away on a female actor and they cut to a close-up of the guy’s balls doing their dance. Some drunk guy says “Those look like rotten oranges”. Same result.
We recently finished the seven-performance-long run of an interactive student musical theatre show (speksi) and how have a week and a half before we go on tour. Much like with other theater productions, the last show usually tends to feature a lot of gags which performers and the crew pull on each other. This year was no exception.
In one scene, the main character explains a concept for a new mascot to a group of abstinence advocates, flipping back a chart to reveal the design. We were a bit worried that the prop crew would put something pornographic on the flipchart instead of the concept drawing; instead, they had made four or five extra copies of the same chart sheet and placed them one after another on the stand, leading to the main character’s line “I present the Abstinence–flip–Abstinence flip Abstinence flip Abstinence flip– ABSTINENCE Armadillo.” (Don’t ask.)
Also, another scene had a singer perform a rousing battle cry while waving not a sword, like in the other shows, but a rubber chicken. Somehow it actually made it even more aggressive.
Back when I was in college, I wrote a few guest editorials for the college newspaper. Nothing much, really, just me trying to be funny and maybe ever so slightly insightful. I just sort of waltzed into the newspaper offices uninvited and handed them over every so often, and apparently the editor liked them. So, I turned into a minor on-campus celebrity for one semester.
At the same time, one of my friends was trying to hook up with another friend of mine, a student in the Department of Theatre and Dance. I’d been going to the university plays for a few years, and I had season tickets, so we went to see her in the show she was in that spring, a ballet called Coppelia. After the show, I went backstage (he didn’t have the guts) to talk to her and take her out to talk to him. I didn’t customarily go backstage, mind you, but I’d taken the theater class before and got to tour the place through and through, so at least I knew where to go.
So, I stroll back there looking for her, and I’m surrounded by all these ballerinas. And the funny thing was, they recognized my picture from the paper, and started talking about my articles and telling me how much they liked them. It was crazy; I was backstage, having just watched them perform, and I was the one getting the compliments. It was bizarre, but really cool at the same time. Especially since, frankly, these girls were hawt. As a guy who doesn’t get many ego strokes, that was seriously awesome.
Anyway, I don’t mean it to sound like I’m bragging, it was just a very cool and surreal moment for me.
In high school, we did a hack night to conclude our production of Bye Bye Birdie. Towards the end, while arguing with his agent, “Conrad” (the Elvis-like character) waves a piece of paper at his agent saying something like “We had a contract!”, then the agent unfolds the paper and pretends to read it. During intermission, I drew a gigantic dick and balls on the piece of paper, inscribed it “Bob (the actor playing the agent) I want your HOT COCK! Love, Conrad”, and folded it up and gave it to “Conrad”. Down in the orchestra pit, we waited for the argument scene. The agent grabbed the piece of paper, furiously unfolded it, and then stammered for a good 10 seconds, refolded the paper, hemmed and hawed for another 5 seconds or so, glared down into the pit, then recovered and continued with the scene. Conrad stood there smirking the whole time.
During a college production of “Wait Until Dark”. At the climax, after the blind heroine has turned the tables on her attacker and destroyed all the light bulbs on stage and plunged the entire theatre into darkness, the score cuts out. The theatre is in complete darkness, the suspense and tension are at a peak, and the only sound is the two main characters scurrying on the stage. Suddenly, from somewhere in the audience…
faaaaaaaaaarrrrrtttt!!!
Dead silence for about 2 seconds, and then an explosion of laughter that went on for about a minute. I felt sorry for the actors, having the scariest part of the play ruined like that, but damn, it was funny.
This was KINDA performance related, but I think appropriate.
Midnight showing of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King in a college town so we’ve got people waiting for 12+ hours, dressed to the nines, the whole bit. Everyone’s been waiting in the theater for about 3 hours by this point. So the movie begins, everyone cheers. We watch the first preview…Harry Potter. Everyone goes nuts. Then it gets to the end where it has all the writing…
THE FILM WAS BACKWARDS IN THE PROJECTOR!!!
So this room full of 250 nerds that had been waiting for OVER A YEAR for the film and had been waiting at the theater for 12+ hours now had to now wait an extra 5 minutes while they turned the damn film around. COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE. I was thinking we may have a riot on our hands.
We were doing “Wizard of OZ” and had constructed these chickenwire/papier mache trees that actors were in for the apple-throwing scene. The scene was over, pretty much, when one guy decided to fart loudly inside the tree. The soud reverberated, first puzzling the cast, and then nearly breaking them up. The worst part was, apparently it was quite potent, for the poor guy was choking and moaning (really fairly quietly) as the curtain closed. You can hear it on the DVD we made, though. He never lived that down the rest of high school.
And there was the time when a character was supposed to be dragged offstage and shot. However, the shot came early, when everyone was still onstage. They froze, and then continued with the scene, dragging him offstage. Silence. Then, finally, another shot. The audience broke up.
I was stage managing a production of Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). During the second act of the show, there is a great deal of audience participation, including dragging someone up out of their seats and making them run back and forth across the stage as fast as possible. One night, the man that was picked was so excited to be part of the show that he simply didn’t stop running once he hit the edge of the stage and went right through the flat.
I was stage managing and running sound for a production of The Boys Next Door. This was way back in the early 90s, before burning CDs was commonplace, so I had five sound effects CDs and three cassette tapes to sort through over the course of the show.
In one scene, two characters are talking about an upcoming visit from one character’s father. In the middle of their conversation, a doorbell is supposed to ring and the actor says “Wow, he’s FAST!”
One night, I’m backstage, keeping one eye on the production, one eye on the actors lining up backstage, and one eye on my stack of CDs and cassettes.
I hear my cue and I hit the play button the stereo. And instead of a doorbell, I had cued up…
COCKLE-DOODLE-DOO!!!
A chicken.
The actor paused for a loooooong time and finally said. “Wow. He’s… fast.”
When my wife and I saw Nicole Kidman’s “The Others” in the theater, there was one scene where she is out walking in the fog. The whole screen is pretty much this foggy gray-white. Suddenly I see the silhouette of a mouse scurrying across a ledge at the bottom of the screen. It got about halfway across, stopped, and ran back the other way. A lot of other people in the theater must have seen it too because you could hear a ripple of chuckling make it’s way through the audience.
I worked as part of the stage crew for my high school drama team, as one of the perks was being able to sit and watch the rehearsals when I wasn’t needed. One night the cast was rehearsing Guys and Dolls while I and a couple others were watching in the house, and the guy playing Nathan Detroit had to take a pratfall (I think). So he goes down, but there’s a lengthy pause when he should have been continuing with the scene, and finally he groans out, “…I fell on my keys…”
In retrospect, the rest of us cracking up was probably mean, but he had a gift for comic timing and made it hilarious.
At the end when Ali congratulates Will on the wedding, he clapped him on the back so hard he nearly knocked him into the pit.
I was thinking we may have a riot on our hands.