messing up during a performance.

Everyone does, its just an inevitable part of live theatre

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Well I'm not saying you should do it every performance, but Idina Menzel cracked her high note on "defying gravity" and the show went on, you know?

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Exactly. I'm not saying that I look forward to mistakes, but its part of the tension of live theatre

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it is ok sh*t happens. it is live theater...it cannot always go right!

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You know, they do screw up on Broadway too.

Actors and performers are human. Much as we like to think we're God, we're not, and we do mess up occasionally.

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I was attending classes at Society Hill Playhouse in Philadelphia in 1979 and got the lead in that year's show. There was a scene that led into a dance number. The line that led up tot he beginning of the dance number was almost the same line the opened the scene after the dance number. I delivered the line to the scene after the dance number and can remember the looks from my fellow actors. The person with the next line started winging it as did a few other actors and we brought the dialoug back around to the dance number and went on with the show. It was my first experience with improvising in the middle of a performance. The audience had no clue what had happened. My teachers did though!

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I played piano with a small jazz band at my high school once. I followed the music the way it was writte, but I guess they had changed the order of something and I didn't know. So I ended up finishing the song before they did. I don't think anyone noticed, but it was really embarrassing. That's part of live performances.

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Jazz has such an improv feeling anyway, as long as you don't panic, and keep going, no one will notice.

I've done lots of amateur theatre, and I am always shocked at what the audience doesn't notice. Stuff that seems like major catastrophes to us, my friends in the audience almost never catch!!

I have a bootleg of "Putting It Together" when it was first tried in Oxford with Diana Rigg.

On the performance that my friend who taped it saw, Diana Rigg totally got tripped up in the lyrics of "Getting Married Today."

She stopped the band and told the audience something like "I'm sorry Ladies and Gentlemen, the lyrics to this song are extremely difficult and you deserve to hear them as written."

She started the song over and nailed it.

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Ruthie Henshall had a complete blank-out at the first preview of "Putting It Together" on Broadway. She said to the audience "I am talking a load of rubbish and you know it". The audience laughed, but she didn't forget her lines after that.

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I remember YEARS ago when I was little we saw Neil Simons all female "Odd Couple" with Sally Struthers and Rita Moreno, and Rita Moreno tripped going up the little steps to the apartment door. The whole audience went "HHUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!" (that's supposed to be a worried inhalation") but the other ladies on stage just went on playing Trivial Pursuit (which they play in the all female version instead of poker).
I've never forgotten that, I always thought someone should have asked her, in character, if she was ok.

Also, Jessica Lange in "Streetcar Named Desire" knocked over a beer bottle and just watched as it rolled around and then eventually off the foot of the stage. Just watched, for a long 30 seconds or something. Maybe she was waiting for someone to yell "CUT!"

i was talking to someone on the production staff of B&TB and apparently on night a dancing plate fell over onto her back during "be our guest" and was grounded there for the whole number. like a turtle on her back, the guy said. funny. but really, thats one of the suckiest and most wonderful things about live theatre. anything can happen.