adolph@ssc-vax.UUCP (Mark Adolph) (11/27/84)
*** YOUR MESSAGE *** This is another unsubtle attempt to get a net.theatre started. I'd like to hear from all of you theater people your most amusing theatrical anecdote. Now I know that anyone who has spent any time in a theater has at least one good story to tell. I will start the ball rolling with one of my own. This occurred during a community thater production that I designed (and hung and focused and ran and...) lights for recently in Tacoma, Washington. It was a four-act play set in England in 1910. Part of the fourth act featured four characters: Hobson (the main character), Henry (his good friend), Tubby (a servant) and a doctor. The doctor only appeared in the fourth act, but conveyed information crucial to the climax of the show. As of 30 minutes before curtain, the doctor was several hundred miles away, where his plane was having its brake pads changed. We started the show 10 nminutes late and extended intermission by 5 minutes in the hopes that he would arrive on time. By intermission, he wasn't there, and we started to plan how to cover for him. The director was going to play the part but, lacking a costume, he would have been hard-pressed to play a it convincingly, so we planned to cut the doctor's part and have Henry and Tubby (who opened the act) ad lib the information. By the end of Act III, the doctor had still not arrived, so we went ahead with the cuts as planned. Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men. With all of the uncertainty, Hobson missed his cue to enter. Now Tubby and Henry were onstage, trying to figure out what to do next. Tubby started in ad libbing about the how the doctor had been by earlier to examine Hobson, and what he had said, when the stage left door flew open and the doctor, his hair wet from rain, only partially costumed and not at all made up, poked his head in and said in a perfect Scottish accent, "Am I early?" Both actors stared at him, then Tubby replied, "Yes, but I'll get the master right away", at which point he exited right, the doctor exited left, and Henry was left sitting in the middle of the stage by himself, smoking a pipe, with absolutely nothing to say or do. Somehow, we made it through the rest of that opening night performance, and I'm convinced that the audience never realized quite what was going on. Nothing like depending on the "magic of theater." -- Mark A. ...uw-beaver!ssc-vax!adolph "Computers are like preppies: they just boil around in their own way and you have to do things their way or they blow you off." "Everything that was different was a different thing..."
adolph@ssc-vax.UUCP (Mark Adolph) (11/27/84)
*** YOUR MESSAGE *** Please post any anectdotes to net.misc, so that they'll all be in one place. -- Mark A. ...uw-beaver!ssc-vax!adolph "Computers are like preppies: they just boil around in their own way and you have to do things their way or they blow you off." "Everything that was different was a different thing..."
rjw@ptsfc.UUCP (Rod Williams) (11/28/84)
> This is another unsubtle attempt to get a net.theatre started. I'd like to > hear from all of you theater people your most amusing theatrical anecdote. Okay...my first appearance on the boards was in a college production of Federico Garcia Lorca's "Bodas de Sangre" (Blood Wedding) - in Spanish, though that doesn't concern this anecdote. I played a friend of the Bridegroom and at the wedding was required to gesture excitedly stage right and shout "Here comes the Bridegroom!" (Aqui esta el novio!). Yes, folks, on opening night, the Bridegroom got confused backstage and made his triumphal entrance stage left. -- Rod Williams dual!ptsfa!ptsfc!rjw "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"