Unplanned moments onstage

Cafe Society
21

I already mentioned a few in the thread that inspired this one, but as with most people in the theater, “Oh, I just remembered another one…”

I was directing a college version of Antigone and the young people were very dedicated and quite obsessed with being accurate historically in regard to costume.

Among other things it meant that the guys shaved their body hair (at least the visible parts). Someone had researched the era and apparently they did that sort of thing and no one was wearing underwear either so no underwear lines and straps and the like.

You can see what’s coming, can’t you?

I had a young woman playing Tericies (sp), the blind fortune teller. She was wonderful. Very attractive, but willing to make herself quite ugly for the part, very beautiful voice, but screeched the lines to give it a witch-like charactazation. Anyway she is on stage with Creon and in her ranting and blind stumbling her gown got under Creon’s foot and she lerched away and the gown didn’t learch away.

She didn’t lose a minute however, and before she totally flashed the house she turned her back to the audience, continued with her lines, scooped up her gown which was mid-buttock at that time, rewrapped it as if it were as natural as could be and the only time she paused was when the audience gave her a standing ovation for her lack of a mistake. In the end, the only person who got an eyeful of her womanly charms was the actor playing Creon who was stading directly upstage of her at the time. When the other actors asked him what the view was like, his response was, “You know I never go on stage with my glasses on and you know I can’t see a thing without them.”

He was either a horrible loser, or one of the most tactful gentlemen of our time.

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22

Once, during a dress rehearsal for our high school production of Bye Bye Birdie, the guy playing Albert (lead role) somehow locked himself into the bathroom in the dressing room. We all teased him mercilessly for a few minutes, then finished the rehearsal. More than one person joked that he had better not do the same thing during the actual run.

But, naturally…

Interestingly, he managed to lock himself in at the exact same point in the show as when he did it during dress. This was when all the adult folk found Hugo, drunk (on milk!), because his girlfriend was on a date with Conrad Birdie. Fortunately, since we were all onstage, it was easy to ad-lib a lot of angry accusatory arguments. The guy playing Hugo outdid himself, yelling, “Leave me alone! I’ve got such a headache! Waaaaaaaa…”

23

Wow. I love threads that are inspired by other threads insipired by other threads. In this case of theatre threads, would that be “Six Degrees of Thespiration”?

<crickets>

Annnnyyyways, I mentioned this in a thread long ago: we were performing Twelfth Night:[ul]
[li] Maria accidentally flashed Aguecheek when she went to pull her peasant blouse below her shoulders.[/li][li] One of the Duke’s henchmen was playing maracas during the first song when the maraca head broke off and rolled across the stage, leaving him stuck with a stick.[/li][li] Sir Toby’s asprin bottle (visual joke where he cannot open the bottle but Maria does) broke open in his hands and scattered aspirin all over the stage.[/li][li] Malvolio stormed off stage slamming the door, and the decorative pineapple over the loudly crashed to the floor - certainly emphasized his exit.[/li][/ul]

The last three occurred on closing night. Made the wrap party very lively.

24

I was a stage manager all through high school so I was up in the booth calling cues during all of our ‘mishaps’.

The best one (and the best cover) was during “You Can’t Take it With You” when my best friend who was playing the ‘xylophone’ husband above, sat on a chair and it literally exploded into a dozen pieces spilling him to the floor. The matriarch of the house didn’t skip a beat and said "Oh, that’s okay, it was an old chair and sent someone for a new one in the 'basement (which was luckily the side of the stage that had access to the prop room… we didn’t have a crossover between sides.)

This next one isn’t funny…

We had a morning matinee for a series of one-act plays planned (pay your $5 for a ticket and get miss class… we always had a packed house) We arrived at 5 am to prepare all sleepy and incoherent to find out that a new crew member had committed suicide the night before. All four plays were about suicide, two irreverent and two serious. I think we cancelled the whole performance that day.

25

As a senior in high school, I worked on the stage crew for a community college production of “Sleuth.” A friend of mine on the crew, who was into target shooting, volunteered to fire a black powder pistol (with no bullet) when the director/instructor was stumped on an effect for the safe blowing up. The noise and smoke really impressed everyone.

On the final performance, my friend used a double charge of powder without warning anyone. He was kind of mischevious like that. When the safe “exploded” the smoke and noise shocked the two actors and there was a pause in the dialogue until they regained their composure and remembered the next line.

I guess you could say that the play went out with a bang. :smiley:

26

I probably shouldn’t have read this thread since we are starting a full musical production of Les Mis next week.

However, I foresee many problems with this play. We have 2 and a half (someone part time) lighting people, the backstage director handling the sound effects (thank goodness we hired a sound crew for the music), a maximum of 5 running crew members, and the cast doing their own makeup. In addition, costumes were headed up by the narrator, so she had to memorize her lines and contend with splitting 130 costumes amongst 4 or 5 people, to be done in less than 2 months with regular high school classes also going on.

27

While doing the children’s show Ozma of Oz in college we had a set piece (a larger version of the piece in the right of this picture) catch fire during a performance. I (playing the chicken you can see in the picture) split for the stagedoor (as my costume was made of foam rubber) while the stage hands quickly put out the fire, ventilated the theatre, and waited for the fire deaprtment to arrive. Curtain went back up thirty minutes later.

While doing a show at one of our local community theatres, we had a cast member have a miscarriage onstage. She still completed the scene (luckily, her last in the show). Mind you, her opposite on stage noticed what happened, and skipped about five pafes of dialog, which she never noticed).

28

Slight hijack.

It’s not theatre, but it was a stage.

Mr zoogirl used to play regularly in a local band. One evening they were over at the old St. Alice in North Vancouver. This was one of the more, um, interesting bars around. Anyway, while the guys were onstage I sat at the band table with the drummer’s wife, Sandy. A guy came up to us an asked if one of us would dance with him. He was pretty loaded, but Sandy finally agreed, just to get rid of him.

They only lasted on the floor for a few minutes - the guy was literally falling down. Sandy came back and sat down and the guy followed her. Now, the boys had left their beers on the table while they played and this fool grabs Dave’s, (Sandy’s husband), beer and takes a big swig. Big mistake!

Mid song, Dave comes flying offstage, grabs the guy, shakes him, and jumps back up on the stage. He grabs the mic and proclaims loudly “I don’t care if you dance with my wife, but leave my beer alone!” :eek:

Then he calmly finished the song!

29

I played Jonathan in AinOL and on closing night when I was about to be taken away by the police, I stop to have some dramatic exit lines to my family. Well the cops arresting me were supposed to stay with their handcuffed criminal but they just walked out and left me there. I turned and looked at the empty doorway and I turned and ran across the stage and while handcuffed jumped through the window and ran off yelling ‘I’m free! I’m free!’.

Huge round of applause.

30

Outdoor theater can best be discribed as mistakes waiting to happen and then continuing on as if you planned it.

In outdoor drama when you have a spotlight on you, expect bugs. I have known more than a few singers that were joined in their songs by insects (free meals). A bit more scary was when a rattlesnake joined us on stage for “Billy the Kid” which we were doing as an outdoor musical-drama in New Mexico. We moved to the opposite side of the stage finished the scene and did a lights out after the scene and killed it with a shovel and carted it off the stage.

During my three seasons with the show I worked with two different “Billys” and the first one was a very good actor but knew nothing about either horses or guns a necessity in the part. He was constantly falling off his horse or having it run off with him on its back. But my most vivid memory of him was a scene during a funeral where I was playing a minister saying the sermon beside the grave.

Billy is supposed to draw his gun, fire and say something to the effect of “Sam Colt is the only thing I believe in.” As I said the actor playing Billy was not good with guns so he got confused in regard to the order it was supposed to go. He fired then drew his gun. We were using blanks, but they still have a very hot flash when shot. So he burned his leg and foot and briefly started his pants on fire. He immediately started hopping around on one foot howlling in pain slapping at his leg. The audience died, all of the people on stage tried to hold character and they managed to do it pretty well, all things considered, but then I realized I had the next line which began “It will be a firey punishment for you William Bonney if you don’t change your ways.” I unfortunately said it and we lost the cast after than with them literally falling to the stage in laughter.

I could go on for days about things that have gone wrong in outdoor drama, but I have one more story I want to tell. The fellow playing lawman Pat Garrett the first year I was there was, like most of the cast, a trained professional actor, but he had been trained in method acting, a type of method most of us were unfamiliar with. He felt to maintain that first timeness that conversations have, he should not stay exactly with the script so it would be fresh each time he said it and had that realness to it that he felt was important to the show.

So if you were on stage with him and waiting for a specific set up it might not come just the way you expected it and he might not be in exactly the same place one night as he was the night before. It was scary at times. We got in the habit of grabbing him like an old buddy and holding him in place so we would know where to react to him.

In one of the final shows of the season he was looking over at the house where he would soon shoot Billy and turned to his deputy and said “Ya know, Pat…” The deputy interrupted and said, “Pat, you’ve got to get this straight, You’re Pat and I’m Poe. We’ve been ridin’ together for 20 years now and you never get it right.”

For the first time somebody finally turned the table on him and gave him a line that wasn’t in the script. He stared blankly and went “ab…ab…ab…” Everyone backstage died laughing. The audience never knew why that line was so funny.

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