Biggest mistake you've witnessed on stage. — Page 2

umm, during a production in high school i had the distinguised honor of being in control of ringing the phone. Well on opening night, the cord between the phone and the button i pushed got kicked by an audience member (we had a very small theatre) without my knowledge. When the first time came along for me to ring the phone, upon realizing the phone wasn't ringing, instead of makin the noise for the phone my self, vocally, i panicked and spent 3 minutes trying to fix the phone while the actors n staged killed time.

One time i was at a very amature production of Anything Goes and the set of the exterior of the boat fell apart, completely. I promptly left at intermission.

---

Casting Julia MacKenzie as the witch in 'Into the Woods' London version of the show. BIG MISTAKE! Ouch!

I still love when the tomb at Aida got stuck on the stage. So as "Fortune Favors The Brave" began the soldiers all had to stop short when they ran out. Adam and the ensemble did their best continuing the number while people came out and struggled for quite awhile to push the tomb offstage.

---

During one of our performances of the Les Miserables, the revolve overheated during Gavroche's death. It was supposed to revolve after he died and the orchestra would continue. I was one of the dead bodies surrounding Gavroche. When the revolve failed to move, the lights remained on and it was a long period of silence before the revolutionaries quickly began to turn the barricade around thmeselves. The dead bodies and Gavroche, however had to get out of the way. All we could do was scoot off. I guess that death scene wasn't as emotional with the bodies drifting offstage...the show must go on!

My all time favorite came during the revival of "Kiss Me Kate". It was a couple of weeks after 9/11 and all the locals who could possibly make it to Broadway were there to support the shows. There was a definite feeling of giddiness (sp?) and that probably contributed to this fun mistake.

Carolee was onstage singing "I Hate Men". There's a point where she picks up a tankard and sees some men peeking through the tavern door. She throws the tankard at them and one of them is supposed to catch it and throw it back. Well this time they all missed it and it flew into the darkened wing. One of the guys went after it and Carolee, realizing that it wasn't coming back, went on singing. A couple of minutes later the guy came back with the tankard and they opened the door and threw it out. By then she was no longer looking for it and the tankard ended up sailing clear across the stage and into the lap of a guy sitting in the first row of the left orchestra. Without missing a beat, he stood up and threw it as hard as he could back across the stage and toward the tavern door. Carolee stood on the stage, singing away, with her head swinging back and forth as the tankard flew by. It was an hysterical addition to an already hysterical song!

---

"The Lion King" on Broadway, early in its run. A performance I will never forget!

Heather Headley (as Nala) fell on stage and injured her ankle. It was just after the "grown up Simba" had come back home. The two characters, not recognizing each other, have to go through a choreographed "stage combat" moment. It was during this sequence that Heather got hurt. She sat there on the ground, not moving for about a minute, and Jason Raize finally gestured for the stage manager to lower the curtain (which they did).

Then it got even stranger. We sat there, audience buzzing, for over twenty minutes. I figured they were getting an understudy ready, but even then, 20 minutes seemed really long! Children in the audience were chattering away, asking their parents what was happening. Finally, the stage manager stepped out in front of the curtain and made an announcement. Heather was going to the hospital for x-rays, but he assured us she would be all right. However there was still a problem. BOTH her understudies were out: One was very sick with the flu, and the other was away on vacation. The stage manager informed us that a chorus girl, who had never done the role before and wasn't an understudy for it, would be going on to finish the show with the script in hand. She would sing "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" and keep going to the end.

It turned out that she was amazing! They sort of walked her around the stage a bit to help her with blocking. But her acting and singing, and her (nervous) engery, were really terrific. The excited audience gave her a HUGE ovation at the end of the show (deservedly!). I will never forget that. Such a trooper!

---

C'mon Camthorn, if you've never seen worse than BKLYN, you've led a sheltered life. Consider yourself lucky.

I saw Steel Magnolias and I thought 1) Christine Ebersol was really miscast and 2) Marsha Mason flubbed her lines at one point. She was also miscast I thought.

---

Updated On: 8/5/05 at 11:08 AM

Oh, I forgot one! The Lion King story made me remember.

When I saw The Lion King, when all the animals were coming in during The Circle of Life, one of the giraffes stepped on a lady's purse strap and it got caught on its leg. It dragged the purse all the way onto the stage. Then, a little boy, about 10 or 11, ran up onstage after the purse. Not center stage, just at the top of the stairs. He snatched it and got offstage.

At intermission, the usher came to our area, freaked out and asking if a boy had climbed onto the stage. He must've gotten in trouble for that one.

During the Royal Albert Hall concert / production of Les Mis when the young Cosette is singind and the gun goes off unexpectedly. The young performer was so professional, she kept it together and continued as if nothing had happened.

Hmm. Well when I was in the fall play last year (it was a comedy we re-wrote. The original was called...Sea Cruise maybe?) we used a real banana as a prop and someone slipped on it, fell and there was a bit of chaos. The only broadway oops that comes to my mind is in POTO when the person is hanged. There was some sort of malfunction and the dummy never fell so the dancers just started screaming. It was pretty entertaining.

---

I actually have several (both from things I've seen and things I've done), but timmetzner's Into the Woods story reminded me of the production of Into the Woods that I did in summer stock. The guy playing Jack was singing Giant's in the Sky, and went blank on the lyrics. So, he kept energized and acted the song the same as usual, but just kept singing stuff like, "And you climb, climb, climb, you climb up so high, and your way up high, and you climb, climb, climb!"

Ooh! In a production of Little Shop I was in, our plant broke mid-show and we had an unplanned intermission to fix it!!!

---

Well,this was several years ago during the middle school production of My Fair Lady I was in, but...

Basically, our director was lazy. She didn't bother to hire anyone to play music with our singing, so we were forced to sing every song a cappella, without a starting note even. The only actual track of music we had was for the waltz at the end of the first act( our director didn't hire anyone to teach us how to dance, either, but that's another story). The second night, our one stage crew person couldn't get the track to work, so we were just standing there with our partners, waiting for several minutes, until the girl playing Eliza said, "So...what's going on?" And the Higgins said something like,"Well, that guy over there is trying to expose you, but don't worry, I'll protect you." They sort of went on from there, with pauses in between when they were cracking up, and finally, someone from the back said,"Well, let's just dance!", so we all danced without the music, to great applause. Needless to say, I never auditioned for one of those plays again.