Best improvisation moments

At Encores Lady Be Good, there was a scene where Douglas Sills' character handcuffs himself to another person, but the handcuff chain broke. Everyone in the audience cracked up, but Sills played it off super well...he looked at the crowd aghast for a moment (you could tell he was surprised) and then pretended the handcuffs were supposed to break.

On a personal note...when I played Ms. Darbus in High School Musical, I dropped the cell phone bucket in my first scene. I picked it back up and said quickly, "Dear God I'm clumsy!" shocking the nuns in attendance. Then I charged right on to my next line.

I heard that Ben Platt once used the name "Nic Rouleau" instead of Nabulungi and only a few people got it

In the final performance of Xanadu, Jackie Hoffman rather infamously recreated the last scene of West Side Story.

Yeah, there's a history of shows having a line or moment that's a designated "ad-lib" spot for a performer- and after night after night, the performer generally has a stock set of things they can fall back on. The amount of genuine improvisation in productions is really, really low.

Kirstin's last performance with wicked

I saw a production of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde where the gun Hyde pulled on Enfield broke. He fiddled with it for a few seconds before ad-libbing "Must've been made in China!" and tossed it aside. it got the biggest laugh of the night.

Not so much an improvisation moment, but one of my favorite moments nonetheless:



We saw the La Cage revival when Harvey Fierstein stepped in. During "The Best Of Times", he sits on the lip of the stage, holds the hand of a patron at one of the front row tables and sings to them for the first verse. At my particular performance, he held the hand of a male senior citizen (who, after talking to him after the show, was, I believe in his 90s). Light laughter through the audience proceeded as they normally would have, but by the end of the verse when he sits the hand back down, instead of letting his hand go, the old man slides his hand up higher and grabs Zaza's boob.



Harvey and the entire cast couldn't suppress the laughter and the band had to stop the song so that the entire cast could get their laughs out. After about a minute of the cast laughing (it was a long time), Harvey goes "Woo, we're having fun tonight!"



We were indeed!

There's a bootleg video of Phantom@Majestic Theatre where Joseph Buquet fails to appear to tell the girls the tale of the Phantom. So, the actress playing Meg didn't miss a beat and took on the role Joseph Buquet does - making it look like a bunch of teenage girls telling ghost stories around a campfire.

Threepenny Opera at the Atlantic a couple years ago, there's a scene when they try to open a desk drawer but it was stuck. The actor (was it F. Murray?) looked out and said "well the drawer is stuck but if it opened I would have pulled out . . ." and the show went on

Bebe Neuwirth in "Chicago," when it was still at Encores. She was finishing "When Velma Takes the Stand" and did a wrong dance step, so she ended the number about two seconds after the button. She glanced up at James Naughton and rushed, "This is my new finish, Billy, how do you like it?" Terrific.

I read about a production of Macbeth where a weapon broke during every single performance in the 4-week run, but one instance was spectacular.

"During this particular performance, we had gotten to the Macbeth vs MacDuff fight without a weapon breakage thus far, and everyone was holding their breath to see if we'd get through the performance weapons intact. On the third blow of the fight, Macbeth's sword shattered. The sword blade flew backwards and embedded itself in the proscenium, the pommel dropped to the stage, and the quillons flew upstage, striking the cyclotron, leaving the actor standing there in front of God, the audience, and MacDuff holding the grip of the sword and with a full four-minute swordfight to perform. The actors improvised a brilliant grappling fight, ending with MacDuff standing over the prostate and pummeled Macbeth with his sword raised to decapitate the unfortunate Scot. The alert light crew went to a full blackout just as the sword came down, and the scene ended with a dull "thunk" in the darkness as the sword hit the stage. The crowd, as well as the crew and cast backstage, went berserk with applause. When asked later what he would have done if the blackout hadn't happened, the actor playing MacDuff replied, "Well, I probably would have decapitated him. It's OK - he a method actor anyway."

Taye Diggs' first show in HEDWIG...he tripped over the microphone wire, slid/fell on the car, and messed up a punchline of a joke...his improv was really great with all those little things.



And, of course, John Cameron Mitchel is an absolute master of improv. First thing that comes to mind is when a few people came in after the opening song, sat in the front, he took their drinks, drank them, and dumped the remainder on the latecomers' head. What a show.