By Michael Barbieri***In the hit Broadway and West End comedy The Play That Goes Wrong, an amateur theater company presents a murder mystery beset by multiple onstage disasters. Collapsing sets, props falling from the walls, blown lines and an actress being knocked unconscious make for a frenetic, hilarious evening. It’s staged for laughs, of course, and the vast majority of professional shows go off without a hitch. But live theater is, after all, live, and will always be prone to occasional mishaps.
So…what happens when a play actually does go wrong? Well, I’ve seen a lot of theater and have been witness to some remarkable theatrical gaffes. Here are just a few:
Many years ago, I saw the musical Annie while it was still in out of town tryouts in Washington, D.C. The night we attended, Dorothy Loudon, playing Miss Hannigan, blanked on her lyrics during her first solo number, “Little Girls.” As she went into the bridge of the song, she suddenly stopped singing, put her head in her hands and then exclaimed to the audience, “I forgot!” A more pleasant unplanned moment happened at the end of “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile.” The number ended with the orphans belting the phrase “Smile, darn ya, smile!” and striking a pose with their arms outstretched, one upstage, the other downstage towards the audience. The crowd went berserk! The applause went on and on, even after Hannigan made her entrance and blew her whistle at the kids, which ordinarily would’ve brought the ovation to an end, allowing the show to move on. But the applause continued. Loudon blew the whistle again, but the kids held their pose and the cheering redoubled. Realizing that the orphans were going to milk that moment, Loudon turned and blew her whistle at us! That got a huge laugh and even more applause. Finally, Loudon threw up her hands in mock annoyance, exited the stage and allowed the ovation to die down. She then re-entered and delivered her next line: “Do I hear happiness in here?,” which got a roar of laughter—and the show finally continued. A true show-stopper!
Dance of the Vampires was one of the costliest and most notorious flops to ever play Broadway and while there were some spectacular moments, mostly involving the phenomenal staging, there was one element that was just jaw-droppingly ridiculous! I had heard, from an inside source, that previews had been extended several times due to technical issues. One of those issues was a bat, which was reportedly a true marvel—swooping into the audience and landing again on the stage. But apparently the bat malfunctioned constantly and had to be scrapped. What made it to the stage was a tatty-looking rod puppet that the Muppets would’ve been ashamed of! This “amazing” bat should’ve had two evil, glowing eyes, but one of them had broken and I’m guessing the producers didn’t think it worth replacing. So this overlarge, janky, one-eyed bat fluttered onto a windowsill and delivered lines in a silly strangled falsetto, eliciting unintended laughs from the audience. Wow! Just wow!
In 2006, The Threepenny Opera was revived at Studio 54 with a wonderfully off-beat cast, including Cyndi Lauper, Alan Cumming, Anna Gasteyer and Alan Dale. My husband and I went to the theatre, picked up our tickets and waited for the house to open at 7:30. Well, 7:30 came and went, but the doors didn’t open. People were getting restless, when a house manager came out and told us the computer that ran the show’s microphones had crashed but they’d allow us to be seated while they worked on it. We took our seats and waited… and waited… and waited. The cast, who made their entrances through the house, began to gather at the back of the theatre, but still, nothing. The impatient audience began to clap rhythmically, demanding the show begin. Lauper put an end to that by exclaiming, in her exaggerated, high-pitched Brooklyn accent, “THEY’RE HAVIN’ TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES!” That got a huge laugh from the crowd who then settled down. Finally, there came a muffled announcement over a makeshift PA system, telling us they weren’t able to get the sound running again. They said the orchestra would go home and the cast would sing the entire show unamplified, with only a rehearsal piano as accompaniment. A few audience members left, choosing to get their money refunded, but the rest of us intrepid souls stayed and actually saw a wonderful, very pure version of the show. At the end, the actors applauded us for staying. A one of a kind evening!
In 2013, Nathan Lane injured himself while exiting the stage during The Nance. He had stepped onto a moving turntable and twisted his ankle, but the audience was unaware of this. When the next scene began, the other actors waited for Lane to re-enter, but nothing happened. They ad libbed a few lines, but still nothing. Finally, the curtain came down and the stage manager announced that Lane would not be able to continue with the show, but that his understudy, who had gone home and gone to bed, had been called and would get to the theatre as soon as possible. 45 minutes later, he arrived and the show continued.
Just last year, we caught one of the last performances of Be More Chill, a contemporary rock musical about technology, teen acceptance and geek love. Everything went well until the house party scene in Act II, when two of the young actors played a scene in the “master bedroom,” and the action stopped, haltingly. The curtain came down and we were told there had been a technical snafu. Part of the set, a platform with an actual bed on it, should’ve been onstage. But the kids had gone on with the scene as if nothing was wrong. If they hadn’t mentioned it, the audience never would’ve noticed. Still, the act began again, bed and all, and the show moved along nicely!
And then there was Spiderman! We caught the second performance, ever, of Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark, in 2010. The production was so massive they couldn’t do out of town tryouts, as the show wouldn’t fit into any venue but the Foxwoods Theatre on 42nd Street. The night we saw it, things were going pretty well; there were some absolutely gorgeous moments, staged by director Julie Taymor. But when Spiderman was supposed to take flight and soar through the audience—one of the main selling points of this show—he flew out from the stage-left wing, made it halfway over the orchestra section, and then came to an embarrassing, dangling halt, suspended over the audience, unable to move. There was an announcement telling us there was a technical problem and that the show would resume as soon as it was fixed. The house lights came up and we could see the flying team trying to reel poor Spidey back into the wings! I swear I could hear the metal wheel squeaking as they pulled him back!
There have been many others, such as Barry Nelson tripping on the scenery and falling backwards onto his tuchas during a scene with Liza Minnelli in The Act. There was another malfunctioning bat in the original Broadway run of the play Dracula, which bounced out prematurely from behind a sofa before flying away. And most memorably, I saw a disgruntled audience member at A Chorus Line, who stood up in the middle of the orchestra section, shouting “What the hell is THIS? You call this a SHOW? This is TERRIBLE!” and stormed out of the theatre, cursing all the way!
Ah! Live theatre! But as the old saying goes, “the show must go on,” and these productions soldiered on bravely when things went wrong. And we got some extremely memorable theatrical experiences!
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