Greetings fellow theatre folk! Joy, Logan and I are just back from a nice mini-vacation to the Motherland (Tennessee, if you haven't been reading along) and some nice fellowship with LOTS of family. We managed to spend a nice, quiet fourth here in Lex-ville watching the fireworks light up the sky. One thing I love about this town is that on the fourth there's not ONE good display , but dozens...you have but to look up in the sky in my neighborhood to see fireworks from all corners (and not the little cheap fizzly things they sell here- the REAL stuff). It was a nice evening.
So, all this shit blowing up got me to thinking about one of the great things about live theatre (or not so great, depending on your pov) - the fact that you NEVER KNOW what might happen onstage. On any given night, a glorius happy accident might occur and bring the show to a whole new level, OR something might go horribly awry and screw up the works completely. So I'm interested, Divas, what are your horror/ happy accident stage stories? Lets hear em!
As always, bonus points to the well-learned individual who gets my title reference (Hint* If you know my taste in music at all, this is an easy one...). Herre's the scores thus far:
Fletch in the boro- 2 pts
Natalie- 1 pt
Diva Master- 1 pt
What a life (aka Dustin) - 1 pt
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17 comments:
Springsteen's "Promised Land"
You're getting soft on us.
Over the last few months, I've gotten sick of talking about "Boone". I feel like it's all I ever reference. But, I was there for over 250 performances (plus all the rehearsals, fight calls, etc) of that show, so I guess it's only natural that most of my stories would come from there.
The amazing thing about the 2004 season there was that I caught almost every horrid thing on video. One actor (aw hell, Lito) was clocked on the face with a war club. (Same actor stabbed self in leg with spear this year. Previous year, stabbed self in back with knife- don't ask. Previous to that, burned by embers from torches he was carrying. Yet, with all that, is/was my best fighter. You have to know the circumstances of all these.)
Another "actor" (loose use of term) fell through a wall. He fell through a wall! HE FELL THROUGH A FRIGGIN' WALL!! (again, caught on tape)
When you have a long run of a show, you don't count the screwups. You count the nights that everything goes as planned. It's much easier that way. We've had people kicked in the kidneys, clocked in the face with tomahawks, shot, beaten in all manner of ways, burned, twisted and torn, choked... not to mention the various moonings, flashings and fondlings the flesh is heir to nightly.
But, I am most proud of the one thing that NEVER happened. We set someone on fire damn near nightly for 3 years under my watch. Not some little "skirt burn" either. (For a fuzzy pic of this burn, check this out http://www.miketuttle.net/Jalbum'/slides/ARays%20On%20Fire.jpg )
We torched a human over 200 times with nary a singed nose hair.
"There are those who say you should not tempt fate, And for them I would not disagree.
But, I never learned nothing by playing it safe. I say fate should not tempt me."
For more such pictures of Boone stuff, plus some video clips (and music clips of some of my own projects!) check out my ill-maintained site at www.miketuttle.net.
(Sorry for the shameless plug. Uh... it IS theatre-related.)
That's ok..plug away, my good man!
And YES - you ae correct sir! Wow- a winner in the first post? Guess I am gettin soft...and in my years at BOONE I saw too many accidnets and screw ups to mention, BUT I , too, was quite proud that not only did we never singe any hairs, BUT there were, to my knowledge, NO gun accidents either. That's pretty amazing, considering the number of guns multiplied by the number of shows...Robby Jacobs, our old pyro guy, is , to quote Rick8, "a friggin stud!"
Fight scenes always have the potential for going haywire and most of my "horror stories" come from those. Swords getting tangled up (damn those fancy hilts), a "kick" to the groin actually hitting its target (ouch!!) a blade breaking during a four-sword fight, leaving me with 1 1/3 swords left with 45 seconds of fighting to finish, and so on. And there was the tour shows that were barely finished before I could get off stage to vomit up all the alcohol I drank the 3 or 4 hours before in the hotel room. Now THAT is horror. No happy stories to recount. They are no fun. Getting paid always made me happy. And getting to meet Dakota Fanning at The Viper Room. MAN, she's hot!! And she can pack that shit away, hoss.
hi, I've been wanting to write, but never any time...
-- last summer I worked at Johnny Applseed, the newest outdoor drama! and it was always unpredictable. --they hired this 69 yr old man, who never could remember his lines... He had a chant where all would echo. it was "Run Johnny run boy, spread the news" he would say, run johnny run... run...go! always different!
----one night during combat, one of the hot indian boys lost his loin cloth and had to kill us in he g-string, but he was embarrassed so he crouched and hid behind me as he was trying to slit my throat. It was a hard death that night as we couldn't stop laughing! -- Also-- in tech, several indians knew they were to be revolved out in the next scene, so the eager savages waited paitently in their places on the rock. They didn't realize that the rock face also revolved on in the last half of the current scene. So as Johnny and Betsy are being lovey-dovey in the moonlight... about 5 indians are caught by surprise as they suddenly appear on stage.... and then were slowly revolved off... We called it the Revolve of Shame! hee hee
So, Ok, Mr Mac- Here it is: During our 95 summer season at the Southern Arena Theatre in Hatties-patch, MS, we were doing a lovely little piece called TIME AND THE CONWAYS (Decent cast and production elements- BOR-RING script...) ANyhoo- one of our "actors" forgot an entrance- in what to the audience must have seemed like Act TWELVE- leaving our beloved Betsy Thompson and Wendy O onstage with nary a thing to do- so Wendy takes off backstage (leaving Betsy all alone!Luckily , Betsy can cry on cue, so she just emoted like crazy for what must have seemed to HER like an entire act) and begins to ream out those of us waiting backstage. The Divamaster and myself had just made our final exits from the show, so we couldn't go back on, thus the task fell to Mitchell Moore or Young Ben Craven to go out, make some shit up , and get us back on track. If I live to be 100, I'll never forget Ben's ADAMANT refusal to go out onstage early ("I'm not goin!!! No, it ain't me...I'M NOT GOIN!!!!") Finlly, Mitchell goes out, starts ad-libbing w. Betsy for about 10 minutes (which turned out to be the most interesting 10 minutes of the show!) and finally gets everything back on track, when low and behold, the missing actor comes in the back door, fresh from a mid-act smoke break and realizes "OHMYGOD- I forgot my entrance!".... No shit, sherlock! But we all got by, and truthfully most of the 90 + year old audience was probably in a deep REM sleep by that point anyway...if my brother is trolling these boards, you HAVE to post the story about the kid that puked in/on the audience during your production of PENTACOST...I was there and it was PRICELESS!
Southern Arena Theatre. Summer of 94. Neil Simon's RUMORS.
I played Ken.
These happened on different nights of the production.:
OPENING NIGHT: A lot of slamming doors in that show. On my first exit, the door frame, THE FRAME!, ripped out of the wall.
ANOTHER NIGHT: A guy (a doctor we later discovered) got a pager call. He got up from his seat, opened and walked through the set's doorway onto the stage, crossed the stage and exited the theatre while the actors were in the middle of a scene.
Also funny about that is: Because of the events in the play, one of the characters calls a doctor and has him paged while he is in a theatre.
ANOTHER NIGHT: About five or so minutes before the end of the play, an audience member who had obviously loved and seen a lot of productions of the show, started saying our lines aloud BEFORE we did.
I love it live!
McElheney and Biscuit!! How the hell are ya?!?
2 things: #1 (inspired by Biscuit's story) was Billy Crank losing his loincloth onstage in Boone 2001? 2002?. Poor boy slunk off embarassed as all get-out, AFTER finsishing the scene hiding behind Mr Boone, whispering:
"Hey man! Muh loincloth come off! Whuddo I do?"
#1b (ok, I lied) - Mason Hill, playing the murderous Fireghost, scalps poor Jamie Boone with his back to the audience, yanks the blood-soaked scalp up victoriously, whooping, and... loses his grip on it, flinging it into the fourth row and into the lap of a 7-year-old child. Mason looked over his shoulder, shattering any pretense of fourth wall, and grinned at the kid (cross-eyed, of course). I was in the booth and saw the whole thing with my chin on the sound board. I had to change my pants.
#2 - As long as we're asking Mr. X to recount stories, I love the "Signor Pantalone, may I have a word with you?" story he's told me. I don't know if it'll translate well to text, but if Tim wants to give it a stab...
The first time I did Stop Kiss it was on the world's tiniest stage ever. The deliniation between pre-attack and post-attack scenes was simply a wheelchair placed downstage of the living room set. One night, I'm sitting there giving directions to the airport and look up at the actor playing Sara, who has this frozen horrified look on her face. I follow her line of vision and there, in the middle of the living room is this random wheelchair...just inexplicably hanging out there in the middle of what was supposed to be my living room. My mind began frantically racing screaming acknowledge it! deal with it! cover it dammit! But all I could think of to say (which I didn't, thank god)was "These damn handicapped burglars in New York! They're always leaving their wheelchairs behind!"
The same run also included the collapse of a wall shelf during a very tender romantic moment and a stubborn sheet that could not be pulled out of the sofabed by an even more stubborn actor who would not give up and just kept pulling maniacally for what seemed like an eternity.
but it just doesn't beat a goat fart followed by a great line.
To Tuttle's reference, we were doing SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS at MTSU, closing night I believe, and just about EVERYTHING was going wrong (unfortunate too, as this show rocked every other performance!). Toward the end of act 3, Jay Fults, who was playing Brighella the Innkeeper , is supposed to come on and break up an argument by saying "Signoir Pantalone, May I have a word with you?" , to which I bring him down with a "Yes yes Masster Brighella, settle this argument blah blah blah..." Well , on this evening, Jay came in about FIFTEEN MINUTES too early, said his line to a stunned, unprepared group of actors " Pantalone, may I have a word with you?" Quick thinker that I am, I merely turned to him and ad-libbed a "...no??" to which he nodded, said" Right then" and back offstage he went without even breaking his stride...It was one of the funniest moments I was ever a part of!
There is also the great story Mitchell Moore told me (which very well may be urban legend, but it's funny anyhoo) about a Passion Play (not the one w. the farting mule!) where at the end of the evening when Jesus gets a spear to the side, an unfocused actor grabbed a REAL spear from backstage instead of the prop spear, and skewered the poor Jesus-actor, who then apparently let out a resounding "JESUS CHRIST- I've been stabbed!!!! Man, I don't care WHO you are , that's funny!!!
btw- there should be quotations after "...I've been stabbed" - the "larry the cable guy" quote was not part of the joke...
the passion play "jesus christ i've been stabbed!" is an urban myth, along with the drunk doctor in the miracle worker who at the very beginning of the play declares "this baby is dead!" to which the father says "don't you mean deaf, doctor?" at which point the drunk actor says "nope. dead. dead as a doornail!" as the myth goes they had to drop curtain and start all over again.
i forgot about how the second time io did stop kiss, i slipped on some water and my legs completely shot out from under me, kicking this huge crate of magazines and stuff out through the "all"of the apartment and off the edge of the stage. i had to run off for a quick change, and when i came back on (slightly limping) i knew i had to deal with it or it would become a show about a kicked over crate. so i broke the apartment "wall" too, hopped off the edge of the stage (much to the shock and chagrin of my fellow actors) and just kept going with the lines, shouting them from the theatre floor up to the stage. perhaps not the best means to rectify the situation, but it was definitely funny.
Best theater messup in my life was during "The Compleat Works of Willm Shkspr. (Abridged)." At the end, Hamlet is done in 3 minutes by shouting key lines and with selected props. The way the staging/casting is set up, one character is the prop person, running on and off stage passing out props to move the plot forward. The poor woman had to spend fifteen minutes placing her props each night to make sure they were correct. Of course she messes up once.
One character says "Bring us the foils" and from offstage Prop-Woman shouts, "I can't find the foils!" panic! I had a dagger i grabbed from her earlier so i say my line and stab myself, falling to the ground, but my fencing partner is left with nothing... Until she is handed a Stuffed Cat with a definitive "Here" from Prop-Girl. So she attacks herself with the cat (to the neck) and dies.
8 years later it still cracks me up thinking about it...
Ponder! How ya doin'?!
The "golden torch". I remember this. No one even watched the final courtroom scene and we had to do meet-and-greet in the rain shelter so Robby could hose the torch out. And, regarding the flooded stage night, (and I know Tim X does not like this, but I do) if you recall we went on with the friggin' show that night after literally bailing and syphoning the water off. It was my first exposure to what I considered a die-hard attitude from that dyke (whom I still love dearly), but I now admit that it was a bit extreme. Nonetheless, it did instill in me a never-say-die attitude. Then again, I personally called almost 20 rainouts in that very same theatre.
Hey, I'm not putting my people in danger.
For the record, Phil, whenever the body burn stunt is talked about, you are always mentioned. We do delineate between the "arm-burn" era and the "body-burn" era, but solely for the sake of consistency in pictures. As far as Boone lore is concerned, Phil Ponder ushered in the Era Of The Burn as a whole... then he f**ked up his foot falling out of the blockhouse and ended up playing video games for weeks. That's the irony of Boone: We set an actor on fire and he does fine. So, we have to throw him out a window 15 feet high onto an uneven ground surface too.
Add to all this the jerk harness stunt that no one ever saw, a Star Trek actor who tomahawked Boone in the eye, and the fact that Tim X. is scared of lightning... geez.
Speaking of, where is Timmy Bell?
Yeah...scared of lightning when it's ALL AROUND US!!!!! "Oh - that lightning is 2.7 miles away..I know cause of this old WIVES tale that says blah blah blah..." Tell that to the hundreds of people every year who get hit with lighting the next state over! And as I recall, the drizzle that night caused Doc to turn an ankle coming out of the blockhouse- but those five old ladies in the audience got a GREAT SHOW!
And , just for the record, I never said I didn't like the fact that said GM was hardcore, I just feel that there's a point in a VERY long summer season when, after ZERO rain outs, you cut your actors a friggin break. I'm all for the "show must go on", but not a) at the expense of the safety of the actors and b) just so I can say WE DIDN"T HAVE ANY RAIN OUTS THIS YEAR!"
But, once again, you know this Mikey, as you were always good about cutting the gang loose if the weather sucked.
btw- lets watch throwing around terms like "dyke" ole cap'n, shall we?
...and anyone looking for Tim Bell can find him HERE
http://www.wdwmagic.com/motor_stunt_show.htm
Heather, haven'e you learned by now that George is ALWAYS right????
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