Ariel made her middle school stage debut last night in the school production of “Grease.” One of the very few sixth graders cast in a major speaking role, she played “Jan,” the chubby Pink Lady with eyes for “Rump,” the mooning champ of Rydell High. The audience just adored her. However she was mortified when, during the big high school hop sequence, she did a kick too aggressively and sent her left shoe hurtling into the audience. “The hop” indeed as she did the rest of the choreography with one shoe on while the errant footware was recovered and returned.
PAD
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That story’d be funnier if she had been performing your stage play “Shoeicide.” 😉
Corey
My high school did Grease a couple of years ago, and we had a different problem. There was one scene where several of the guys (unfortunatly, I don’t remember names of characters) were supposed to pull the pants of anothers down, revealing comical boxers, and ending a scene. To the horror of all, they took more than the pants down, in front of the rest of the high school, as well. Needless to say, he was embarrassed about it for quite a while afterward.
Just a few weeks ago, my brother was in a play out in San Diego called Fraulein Else. As he relates the story to me, during the course of action the lead actress sat on a stool, she reached down to adjust the stool by grabbing one of the legs … it came off. The stool had four legs and didn’t tip, but ironically a few moments later another actress entered and, saying her lines as written, told her “she didn’t have a leg to stand on.” The audience had a good chuckle!
I was also in a production of “Music Man” where on opening night, as the overture was playing and the lights were slowly coming up – one of the 2D River City buildings fell forward on top of my little family out to greet the Wells Fargo Wagon. Fortunately, they held the lights while we rebuilt.
And finally, while at a recent “Professional” touring production of “Phantom,” during the great transformation scene back onto the past, the tarps covering the proscenium got caught on one of the sculpted figures – completely ruining the “magic” of the moment. Finally after a series of useless tugs – a stage hand reached out and grabbed the fabric, gave it a sharp yank and flipped the fabric off – only to have it catch on another section of the proscenium. And the orchestra vamped on and on…
Live theatre. Like racing, it’s fun to go to see the crashes!!!
Ariel gave the audiences a special moment to remember and it doesn’t take away from her performance at all!!! Break a leg! (but not really…)
Just a few weeks ago, my brother was in a play out in San Diego called Fraulein Else. As he relates the story to me, during the course of action the lead actress sat on a stool, she reached down to adjust the stool by grabbing one of the legs … it came off. The stool had four legs and didn’t tip, but ironically a few moments later another actress entered and, saying her lines as written, told her “she didn’t have a leg to stand on.” The audience had a good chuckle!
I was also in a production of “Music Man” where on opening night, as the overture was playing and the lights were slowly coming up – one of the 2D River City buildings fell forward on top of my little family out to greet the Wells Fargo Wagon. Fortunately, they held the lights while we rebuilt.
And finally, while at a recent “Professional” touring production of “Phantom,” during the great transformation scene back onto the past, the tarps covering the proscenium got caught on one of the sculpted figures – completely ruining the “magic” of the moment. Finally after a series of useless tugs – a stage hand reached out and grabbed the fabric, gave it a sharp yank and flipped the fabric off – only to have it catch on another section of the proscenium. And the orchestra vamped on and on…
Live theatre. Like racing, it’s fun to go to see the crashes!!!
Ariel gave the audiences a special moment to remember and it doesn’t take away from her performance at all!!! Break a leg! (but not really…)
My personal moment was when I went on stage as Velasco in “Barefoot in the Park” and realized I didn’t have my “laundry list”, my only prop in the scene.
But better yet was the production of West Side Story where at the climactic moment, as Tony and Maria hug and the jealous Shark points his gun at Tony and….
Nothing happens.
He finally came up with the idea of beating Tony to death with the gun.
The point is, tell Ariel, years from now, when she and her friends are talking about the shows they’ve done, all anyone will remember is the night her shoe came flying off.
Kid, now you’re a star…
Sounds like she put her heart and sole into the performance.
During one night of my high school’s production of 1776, Ben Franklin’s pants fell down during the “Homicide, homicide…” number. As I recall, Adams tried to cover by ad-libbing, “Pull yourself together, man!”
The legendary and real person, WONG FEI HUNG was doing a martial arts demonstration on day to a large audience. During the “show” a shoe came off of his foot and hit a woman.
She came up to him angry after the show, she was a daughter of the MOK GA famliy of martial arts, very closely related to Wong Fei Hung’s own Hung-Ga style.
To make a long story short, she became Wong Fei Hung’s wife, and in later years one of the first instructors of the Hung Family style to women.
http://www.yees-hungga.com/hungga/history/index12.shtml
(Do I dare say it?)
Just remember, the show must go on!
(God help me…)
**(Do I dare say it?)
Just remember, the show must go on!
(God help me…)**
And here I thought you’d say the shoe must go on!
PAD
In college, we performed Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I had the part of Prospero. In Act 4, there’s a bit of dialogue I had:
“Then, as my gift and thine own acquisition
Worthily purchased take my daughter: but
If thou dost break her virgin-knot before
All sanctimonious ceremonies may
With full and holy rite be minister’d,
No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow: but barren hate,
Sour-eyed disdain and discord shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it both: therefore take heed,
As Hymen’s lamps shall light you.”
Growing tired of the obvious jokes about hymens…in rehearsal one night I uttered the line:
“Then, as my gift and thine own acquisition
Worthily purchased take my daughter: Please!”
This totally broke up the lighting director and stage manager (as well as the director, but he recovered quicker). On the final night of the performance, I started my dialogue, with a lingering pause after “take my daughter”, and did a slow turn looking up towards the lighting booth. Then I went on with the rest of the scripted dialogue. However I could hear the laughter coming out of the booth and from backstage.
And at the wrap party, the director came up with “what foods these morsels be”.
Gotta love the Theatre!
I gotta add my comments to this theme.
My family and I got to see Robert Goulet’s tour of “Camelot”. In one of the scenes another actor was hamming it up and Mr. Goulet was starting to get tickled. Eventually, he simply lost it; he turned his back to the audience and started to laugh. Quietly at first, but soon his whole body was shaking. He turned around and the audience could see tears running down his face because he was laughting so hard. He put his hands on his knees, glanced over at the other actor, and still lauging, shook his head. At this point the audience lost it too. It took several minutes before the laughter died down enough for the play to resume.
During a local production of “Godspell”, the John the Baptist actor began “Prepare Ye The Way” by blowing the horn from the rear entrance of the auditorium. If you’ve seen the play, then you know how loud those five notes are. During the last performance, he blew the horn on cue, just as he had every night before. But before he could start singing, a man sitting in the back row, obviously too close to the entrance, shouted “Get that @#$% horn outta my ear!!!” Needless to say, we got a couple of extra refrains before he started singing.
Under the guidance of an employee at our local theatre, Mrs. Barto, my kids both usher at plays/musicals that tour in our city. They tend to usher at the two portals of the balcony. However at this perfomance my son wasn’t able to usher, so my daughter was paired with someone new. A local organzation had bought about fifty tickets in the balcony for needy children. Unfortunatly, the chaperones had told them to sit where ever they wanted to in the balcony. No problem, except for the 100 other people with balcony tickets. To make matters worse, the usher for the second portal hadn’t shown up yet. With no one to help her, and about a hundred people playing musicals chairs, my daughter was starting to panic. Obviously, the audience below had no clue what was happening. Suddenly, the air was split with my daughters plaintive yet piercing cry “Mrs. Barto, where are youuuuuuu?”
In College, I was doing a performance of Love for Love, a restoration romantic comedy. Anyway on the stage, My Character Valentine’s apartment was built on a 8-10 foot platform. Now we do 6 performances of the show. The first 4 were fine, however the 5th one…At the beginning of the show, I go out onto my platform in the dark as music is playing, then the lights come up, I’m sitting in a chair and reading. Anyway, on this 5th night, for whatever reason I looked up at the lights as they were going down. Now my eyes were not adjusted to the dark when I went out onto stage. I knew the general area of where my chair was so I figured I would creep out and grab the arm of the chair and pull it to me. My hand grabbed one arm, the closest one to me, or so I thought, and my other hand went to grab the other arm of the chair, except I had grabbed the far arm and when my other hand went grabbing for the other arm there was nothing there. I felt myself falling off of the platform. There was a desk on the lower stage which I hit. But I got up and walked off the stage. The lights went up and I walk through the door to my platform and sit down and read the book. End of story. The only thing anyone heard was my hitting the desk. The show went off without a hitch that night.
Many years ago during a college production of “South Pacific” those of us playing the Seabees found ourselves waiting on stage for one of the lead actresses who’d missed her cue. It was pretty easy to fill up the first minute or so of dead time with the kind of ad-libbed sailor talk (cleaned up a bit) we’d gotten in the habit of doing during tedious rehersals, but as one minute became two and then three and then four we began to run of material–and we could tell the audience knew the jig was up.
In cold-sweat desperation, one of the guys turns to another and says– “Boy, sure is hot today”. Knowing what was coming, we all braced for the reply: “Sure, but it’s not so much the heat as the humidity.”
We lost it. The audience lost it. We’d managed to turn that moment of the show into a arch New Yorker cartoon…..
Peter David: However she was mortified when, during the big high school hop sequence, she did a kick too aggressively and sent her left shoe hurtling into the audience.
Oh yeah. I remember her now. Darn kid nearly took my eye out….
Wow. First PAD does Grease, then Ariel does it. Is this a pattern?
As for the obligatory theatre moment, I was in a production of Gypsy. I played Uncle Jocko, who is sorta like Krusty the Clown, only more bitter. During the first scene, someone’s cellphone goes off. I point at the lady and yell “TURN THAT OFF!”
I don’t think she’ll ever make that mistake again. Funny thing was that it rang between lines, so it timed itself perfectly for that to happen. The audience loved it. I don’t think she did though…
As high school photographer (and a proud member of the FA department [choir]), I was called out of the darkroom late one afternoon to the rehersal of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”. Grabbing my camera (without having time to reload it and hoping there was still film in it), I was told to wait for the female lead tell off the male lead (she would say “You snake!”) and get a picture.
I soon found out why. Someone had made a paper-mache snake and lowered it from the rigging just as she said her line, and I was able to get a shot of them and it hanging over them. Unfortunately, the director didn’t see the humor in it, and I scuttled away quite quickly back to the darkroom. (And I did get the shot. but it was never used in the yearbook. Too bad.)
My own theater moment occured when I did a walk-on role with about three lines in a one-act my freshling year in high school. Let’s just say that it caused a new edict that no one in that Drama Club was to ever drink a carbonated soda within an hour of showtime.
One I witnessed was a performance at Yale of a student-written musical comedy about the wives of Henry VIII titled “Divorced, Beheaded, Died” (after the mnemonic for the wives’ fates; Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived). A friend from out of town was visiting, and we got to the residential college a bit early due to dinner taking less time than we’d expected.
So we were wandering around, when we run into the props guy, who I happened to know. He clued us in on a prank they were pulling on the actor who played Henry. At one point, Henry was to be shown pictures of a prospective wife, in such a way that they weren’t visible to the audience.
In past performances, these had been photos clipped from fashion mags. For that night’s final performance, the props guy was subbing photos from Playboy and Penthouse.
Play starts. Get to the pictures scene. The actor playing Henry managed quite well; a mild double take, that really only Bob and I noticed because we knew what he’d just looked at. However, on the way offstage, Henry showed the pictures to the piano player, in such a way that at least the first few rows could get an idea of what they were. The piano player lost it completely, managing to somewhat recover by playing a few quick bars of “The Stripper”, while the first part of the audience were laughing their heads off and the rest were wondering just what had happened.
RE: The shoe
Ariel a fan of Sailor Moon by any chance? 🙂
(off-hand note, when first typing this I spelt the name Aerial. That would be a really cool name to give a kid, especially a boy.)
What the hëll, I’ll join in with the horror stories. On opening night of my high school’s production of “Rebel Without a Cause,” I was playing the bit part of the cop who shoots the Sal Mineo character in the end. Sweating like mad. Cheap gun prop. Disaster imminent.
You guessed it. I shot Sal Mineo dead two pages early and everybody had to cover by jumping to the “Oh my god he’s been shot” dialogue.
Obligatory theatre moment:
I played Satan in my church’s production of a play called “Heaven’s Gates, Hëll’s Flames” back when I was in high school, on two separate occasions. (For those of you not familiar with it, HGHF is usually put on by a travelling company that recruits all of the acting talents from the sponsor church)
I went through five performances without a hitch. On the sixth and final night, during the final act, I called out to my demons to grab a woman, “Take him! ….. Take her! Take ’em all!”
I was told most people didn’t notice, but the lady in question and I had a good laugh over it.
Ooh, my turn, my turn! I went to a junior high school performance of The Wizard of Oz, and while hardly disastrous, it was very obviously first night. They had a real dog playing Toto, and it was clear he’d never been on stage with an audience before, as he continually turned to them and barked very loudly. The rest of the cast had to take turns holding him to calm him down. At one point Toto was being held by a crow and a flying monkey! But the real laugher came right at the end. As they were closing the curtain on Dorothy’s exit from Oz, someone forgot to turn off the casts’ microphnes, and we in the audience could hear every bit of what the actors were saying backstage, including what some of them were going to do that night or weekend. The audience was made up mostly of parents, and they were having a ball. Then, with the stage lights off, Dorothy came on stage and lay in the bed for her return to Kansas — and realized why everyone was laughing, and started laughing herself. But by the time the lights came on, she’d composed herself enough to carry on with only the occasional twitter. But when one of the farmhands came in, sat on the end of the bed, and caused the other end to fly up, everyone, cast and audience, lost it, and it was all anyone could do to get through the final few lines and curtain calls.
For me, the involuntarily funniest moment I’ve ever seen on stage was at a performance of Lord of the Dance, during the Breakout number. This is the number where the female dancers disrobe and dance in their underwear. It went well, but the robes had been thrown too close to one of the dancers, and when she tapped, she was sending robes flying left, right and center. To her credit, she didn’t miss a step.
Apart from that, the performance of Black and Blue I saw was notable for the way dancers kept losing pieces of clothes: a button here, a rhinestone there, and even an armband.
had a similar experience in my second middle-school play. at the time, my asthma was totally out of control, and i needed to take several different puffs of various inhalers throught the day. well, i had just finished a musical number, and had a dufflebag with me. after the big finish, my big, round, very rollable inhaler came tumbling out of an open pocket of the bag and rolled into the audience.
this, however, didn’t phaze me. it was when a 4 year old ran on stage and handed it to me, in the middle of the next scene, that i totally lost it.
still got a standing-o, however. not a total loss, i guess.
-eD!
Okay, thought of another one. In a college production of Fiddler on the Roof I was working backstage on, one night during Tevye’s monologue to open Act 2 a small child repsonded to the line “Did Adam and Eve have a matchmaker?” with “No!” in a very clear voice that carried throughout the house. Of course that got the biggest laugh of the night, but Tevye, without skipping a beat, addressed his next line, “Yes, they did!” directly to the child.
At least nobody got injured, unlike my high school production of “Annie Get Your Gun”, when Annie got blasted in the shoulder by her own rifle. (She was leaning on it during her “You Can’t Get a Man With a Gun” performance.) A true trooper, Annie completed opening night after a brief delay, but for the rest of the run the gunshots were simulated by a drum and not by blank charges.
In high school, my acting class did a performance for the kids in the child development class. We did The Wizard of Oz. I played the Wizard. At one point get up from behind the curtian (which was an empty bookshelf over) I hit my head and knocked the bookshelf over. The kids were cracking up. I went through the rest of the scene and to this day the other cast members think it was intentional.
Nah, I can top ya all.
My girlfriend’s son was in his High School production of “Barefoot in the Park” and it gets to the last scene where the husband goes a little loopy.
Now, I’ve never seen the play or the movie before this, so in this case, he goes to the little “crow’s nest” part of the stage that doubled as the older guy’s apartment.
The wife runs in and yells “Where are you, where did you go?” Or whatever the line is.
Anyway, my girlfriend’s 7-year old daughter yells out from our seats on the front row:
“He’s up there, on the roof!”
The look of sheer panic on the actress’ face still makes me laugh.
In Patrick Stewart’s one-man show “Danger lies a Head” (I think that was the title, sorry if I’m incorrect . . . it’s been a few years now since I saw it), Stewart tells a story about a bad mishap on stage.
The play began with Stewart coming out as the King in the play – tall, alert, obviously regal — a conquerer of men. He walked to the center of the stage, then turned away from the audience to walk up a ramp built into the stage.
In turning in a most “royal fashion,” he pulled his cape around, snagging it under his foot. Stepping on the cape, his head was jerked back and he lost his balance, forcing him to fall backwards and land upsidedown on this ramp.
The other actors on stage began helping him up and in a sheer panic he pulled away from them, screaming hysterically, “DON’T TOUCH ME! I’M THE KING!”
After telling this story in his one-man show, Stewart just shook his head and put his head in his hands.
Great story.