Food on stage — Page 2

Picture it: Broadway May 1977. A comedy opens called "Gemini" where the cast has to eat a spaghetti dinner onstage. Those poor actors must have been starched out by the end of the week.

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In the play Moonlight and Magnolias, the actors eat several bananas, and several more are peeled and tossed about the stage during a fight scene, along with about a large bowl of peanuts in the shell (about three pounds worth). Throughout the rest of the show, the cast is basically walkinjg all over the peanuts, grinding them into the floor. A couple of hundred pages of manuscript are toassed about, and a pitcher of water to top things off. It's a nightmare for the prop crew to clean up after each performance.

The ideas of using biscuits on ceramic bones for chicken is brilliant!

I did a production of Dolly with Sally Struthers and the poor prop person couldn't find meringues any where locally (which is what Sally had asked for. They melt in your mouth in seconds.). The prop girl instead used pieces of bread, balled up. So, you can imagine what happened.

Ms. Struthers actually got one caught in her throat one night, walked off stage right to the stage manager, he gave her the Heimlich procedure to remove the item from her throat, and she walked right back on stage and finished the show. That was the moment I fell in love with that woman!

And anyone that does props for Brighton Beach Memoirs should be prepared to make two full dinners for every show....

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I also know that Faith Prince cooked scrambled eggs live on stage every night for Tom Wopatt during "A Catered Affair." They were on The View promoting the show, someone brought it up, and Tom was a gentleman and said they were always delicious except for one night the gas/whatever broke and they weren't fully cooked.

Well, I only remember one smell -- that of the bacon for act III.

I've now done two shows that I can think of that required actual meals.

Years ago for Hello, Dolly! The mother of our Dolly Levi, cooked a brand new Turkey dinner with roasted veggies each night.

Just last year, my prop tart (my props mistress) handled all the food for August Osage County. She served it warm and the actors ate it onstage and then the crew devoured it when it came off.

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I directed a high school production of THE ODD COUPLE that had lots of munchies served during the poker scenes. The biggest problem we had was the linguini that Felix prepares but Oscar throws on the wall. We has the kitchen flats painted with a gloss paint so the spaghetti and its sauce were easily removed.Under the stage lighting, those flats looked like they were covered with patent leather.

As a director, he always recommended that canned pears be used whenever possible as stage food. It was easily digested.

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In GREASE, in the Lunch Room scene, some of the actors ate pudding off of their lunch trays everynight. One of the ensemble girls who I don't know the name of got sick from eating so much pudding so she switched to low fat jello.

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Dora Bryan was known to be eccentric. Her eccentricities became more pronounced as she aged. The American actors who shared the stage with her during London's THE FULL MONTY have scads of stories about her coming onstage with chicken or candy bars in her hands even though the scene didn't call for any food. She'd proceed to munch on them throughout the scene. One person connected with the production (but not a cast member) told me that during one performance she broke character and told one of the American actors that he was so inept he didn't belong on stage.

She had to be replaced in the production.

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Updated On: 9/29/12 at 11:01 AM