Apparently my director went to see a production of West Side Story a few years ago, and the guy playing Chino forgot his gun before coming out for his final scene. Once it got to the big scene where he is supposed to shoot Tony, he screeched “Poison Boots” and kicked the actor playing Tony until he went down. The girl playing Maria then had to jerk the shoe off of Chino’s foot, and had to do the gunshot scene asking “How many kicks Chino? How many kicks, and one kick left for me”.
There should be a blog dedicated to theatrical urban legends. Like that opening weekend of Dracula where Dracula (still hungover) vomited all over the audience during the first stage direction that everyone has a friend of a friend that worked on the show and was there.
or the one where the bridge never came out for Javert’s suicide and so he just pretended to stab himself and then lay there until the lights went out
best story i heard was when a friend of mine saw a show where juliet forgot to bring the dagger out on stage so she just ripped the squib out of her chest and blood squirted everywhere
During a passion play a friend of my brother was supposedly in, one of the roman soldiers who was supposed to stab jesus on the cross and accidentally grabbed the wrong spear- he was supposed to grab one with a fake tip, but instead he grabbed one with an actual metal tip and, well
Jesus screamed “JESUS CHRIST YOU STABBED ME”.
Since that Jesus had to be taken down due to a bad case of stab-itis, the backup Jesus came in, but he weighed significantly less than the original Jesus- which would have been fine, except that at the end the cross was supposed to ascend upwards with Jesus on it, and the weights hadn’t been adjusted.
So Jesus, instead, ROCKETED UP into heaven (or, just, above the stage).
This is wild from start to finish
I was in Peter Pan once and one night at a performance, the adhesive holding our Hook’s mustache on was wearing off. It was near the end with a big fight scene and when he got attacked, he let his mustache fall and went “YOU RIPPED MY MUSTACHE OFF!” in a scandalized tone and it added a new note of hilarity to the whole scene (which was supposed to be funny anyway)
In my seventh grade play, which was a midsummer night’s dream, Thisbe didn’t have a sword so she stabbed herself with a coathanger
My junior year we were doing Romeo and Juliet and after Juliet poisons herself it was supposed to go dark and she’d get off the stage. well the light crew accidentally turned them back on and Juliet who was sitting up slammed back down on the wooden bed with a loud bang. To which my theater teacher says into the com “zombie Juliet” and everyone who heard that had to keep as quiet as possible while our eyes were filling with tears.
i attended my county’s performing arts high school majoring in vocal studies, (mostly geared towards musical theater and opera styles) and once a year we got a field trip to new york (we were in jersey, so it’s not exactly far). we would do one touristy thing, an actor’s workshop with friends of our teachers working in various performing industries in nyc, and then see a show.
my first year doing this, our industry contacts were 1 actor, 1 casting director, and 1 producer to get different aspects of the business, and they all gave us amazing advice and told fantastic stories. the actor in question was Zazu on Broadway’s The Lion King for several years, and told the best story by far.
in The Lion King, there are only two pieces of pre-recorded noise in the whole show. one, when Pumbaa does a MASSIVE fart while fighting the hyenas, and the other being Mufasa saying REMEMBERRRRRR as Simba climbs Pride Rock. the actor told us while struggling not to laugh that, during one night’s performance, someone forgot to flip the tape of these pre-recorded noises.
so, at the end of the show, the great climax where Simba finally accepts his place in the Circle of Life, the heavens parted and-
PFFFFFFFFFRRRRRBTFTBTBFTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT
everyone froze. and then all ran off stage positively HOWLING with laughter.
the lesson: sometimes there are fuck ups you just can’t recover from.
When I was doing wizard of oz they forgot to put the oil can on stage so the tin man could be oiled up so the guy playing the scarecrow went ‘let’s use the magic snow!’ And they started rubbing the tin man with the fake snow.
Also at one point the stuffed dog that was supposed to be toto was left offstage and when they realised someone just launched it at Dorothy so this random dog just flew in in the middle of a scene.
The best one I have is when our barons mustache kept coming off they decided to just take it off so in the next scene someone had to mention that he had a shave or something or when we where doing a dress rehearsal and our Charlie Brown forgot his line so he sang “happiness is finding a sausage” so my teacher put a can of sausages in the mailbox and on the last show he opened it up to find them in their causing us all to laugh
I was a pirate in a production of Peter Pan a while back, and during the “Captain Hook” number in Act 3 I was supposed to be hanging off the railing of the pirate ship. Well, naturally our set had a lot of balsa wood pieces so as I was hanging on, a small piece broke and cut my hand. I basically spent the entire rest of the show bleeding and trying not to get it on my costume. It was amazing 😜
So, my theater company had a version of Beauty and the Beast written specifically for us to do and it wasn’t very good because it had a lot of plot holes, excessive scene changes, irrelevant musical numbers, and just a lot of problems altogether. So there’s this one scene where Beauty is roaming around the castle exploring and she finds a room with a toy soldier and toy ballerina and then she also finds a music box which she opens, and it plays a lullaby that her mother used to sing to her, and 20 more soldiers and ballerinas come out and do a dance(all played by little children and adding nothing to the plot). When the song ends, the toys deactivate and fall on the floor, then the Beast comes into the room.
Now the night my family came to see me in the show, my older brother’s best friend at the time came too, and when the Beast came into the room after the number, Beauty picked up the music box and was asking a question before she opened it again and my brother’s friend very loudly exclaimed “NO DON’T!” because he thought the music would make the number start again. How my cast members managed to get through the rest of the scene is a mystery to me, but my brother and his friend spent the next 15 minutes of the show trying not to burst out laughing.
