That one time Teddy Bautista almost died on stage.
Yeah, so @feerz 's amazing JCS iceberg made me realize that I have never talked about this incident on here before, so I might as well do now.
Here have some book extracts.
From "Jesucristo Superstar. Ópera rock: La Pasión de Camilo Sesto" by Marta García Sarabia (2016):
Teddy Bautista relives the drama of the moment when, due to a technical error, he almost hanged himself for real. [...] It is then when Judas puts his head in the noose. The lifting platform, on which the moment was staged, began to rise to more than three meters high. At that moment there was a failure in the safety harness and the survival instinct made Teddy reach for the rope to protect his neck. The tension reached its maximum, but the public did not notice the failure, instead thought it was part of the staging. The technical team was left speechless. Nacho Artime himself remembers that "we all believed that he had really hanged himself." According to Bautista, "this part, the dramatic-literary aspect of the role was the hardest." In the words of Jaime Azpilicueta, "in one performance the safety rope failed and we were on the verge of having a very serious accident; "He ran out of oxygen, but the performance concluded."
And from "Conversaciones con Teddy Bautista" by Luis Lapuente (2023):
You had a problem at one of the performances, I think.
"Yes, when the muskets broke in the scene where Judas commits suicide. They lifted me by the neck and I was choking, but I held on to the rope and was able to resist thanks to the fact that I was very physically fit, but I got to the platform cussing at all of the... because it is not normal for a musket to be released, someone had made a mistake that could cost me my life, what a fright. I think the audience didn't notice, but inside they did, the technicians, the actors, because they heard me swear in Aramaic, and never better said."
"Swear in Aramaic" is spanish slang for shouting profanities.
