Live Theatre SCs

[Ghostlightkeeper]

My wife and I have both worked for a number of theatres. My favorite story is one of hers from when she was doing box office for a small barn theatre in the midwest. She had a patron call to reserve seats and ask if they had space for someone in a wheel chair. Of course the theatre had handicapped seating and wheelchair spaces. The caller was very happy to hear that and my wife went about setting up the reservation. This is my reconstruction of the conversation based on what she told me.

W=My Wife
STP=Sucky Theatre Patron



W=Ok, so you want to reserve three tickets and one will be for a handicapped seat?

STP=Umm, No we need three seats and a space for the wheel chair.

W=Ok, So that's four tickets and it will be $XXX.XX

STP=Why do we need four tickets?

W=There will be four people seeing the show, is that correct?

STP=Yeah, but one of them is in a wheel chair.

W=Right, so that's four people....

STP=But (Guy in the wheelchair) shouldn't have to pay, he's not using a seat.

W=.....

My wife then had to spend ten minutes on the phone arguing with them about weather or not a wheelchair patron had to buy a ticket for the show. The patron insisted that a wheelchair bound guest shouldn't have to pay because they weren't using a seat.

These people actually thought they were paying for the wear and tear on the seats!

[AnqeiicDemise]

The last show I was in was Twelfth Night. (for those of you not familiar with Shakespeare its the one about the twins washed ashore, the girl thinks the brother is dead and pretends to be a boy to get a job and not be sent to the nunnery.)

On ALL our playbills and even on every entrance, we had the following signs:

WARNING
NO flash photgraphy allowed.
Sharp objects in use within small quarters.

--fyi, our theatre sounsd pretty much like the OP's black box. --


So I'm on stage and its the fight scene. We have REAL (although dulled and counter weighted) rapiers in use and have very specific choreography in play. There's a part where I'm stuck between the two guys fighting for about half a beat before being pulled to a neirby pillar by another onlooking character. Once moved, Sebastian can dorrey do (sp?) onto the stairs, i.e. do the whole fancy-shmancy climbing up the stairs and swinging around a pillar and jumping off of it while attacking.

You guessed it: some retard whips out a camera and proceeds to flash us in the middle of the fight scene. We're all blinded, I was in the mid-stride to get myself pulled and the other guy had already swung. If it weren't because we had practiced that scene a billion times, I would have been injured.

Lets just say that was our best rendition of that scene. My scream was real and my falling on my knees to crawl out of the way made the scene 'pop'.


At the end of the scene, we hear yelling.

My director was chewing this kid a new one and we had to take an early intermission while she, and a few other people, escorted the idiot out of the show. After all, he simply couldn't understand what the big deal was.

[Inker]

The last show I was in was Twelfth Night. (for those of you not familiar with Shakespeare its the one about the twins washed ashore, the girl thinks the brother is dead and pretends to be a boy to get a job and not be sent to the nunnery.)

hehe, I played Viola, too, many years ago. It was my first real acting job.

My favourite heckle ever was from that show, when I came on stage as Cessario for the first time, some kid yelled out "That's no boy! She got tits!"

Which, I guess, was a compliment.

[AnqeiicDemise]

hehe, I played Viola, too, many years ago. It was my first real acting job.

Actually, I played Fabianne (yeah, we changed the sex for our purposes). My rack's WAY too big for me to *ever* play Viola successfully. I'd have to flatten my girls (or try to, anyway) and wear a potbelly to make me look breastless.

[Inker]

Actually, I played Fabianne (yeah, we changed the sex for our purposes). My rack's WAY too big for me to *ever* play Viola successfully. I'd have to flatten my girls (or try to, anyway) and wear a potbelly to make me look breastless.

We had a female Fabian, too. Most of Shakespeare's plays lend themselves pretty well to gender bending.

And yeah, there were a lot of ace bandages involved.

[RecoveringKinkoid]

12th Night is one of my all time favorite plays.

Man. It's been way too long since I've seen a good Shakespeare production. The last one I saw was terrible. Really bad version of All's Well That Ends Well.

We had a guy making swords when I was working theater for a production of...I wanna say McBeth or Henry or something. Something depressing. Anyway, he was driving us all nuts (I was working scenic/props/costumes ) bragging about how he was forging these weapons himself (he was in a metal working class so one of his projects was to make swords for the production). Opening night, the bloody things shattered like ice during a fight scene, one piece flying across the set and imbedding itself in the low wall surrounding the stage (Shakespearean theater, in the round). Doofus had tempered them just a leeetle too hard. Thank God no one was hurt.

Oh, and look: http://innovista.sc.edu/map/noflash/detail.aspx?poi=21
You can see the wall and layout of the theater here, scroll down to the bottom. I see they changed the upholstery since I worked there. It used to be blue-green.

[Can I Help Your A$$?]

We did a production of "The Magic Mrs. Piggle Wiggle." Two of the characters are moms, and they have a duet about how much trouble kids can be. A man tried out for the part of one of the moms, and, of course, it was hilarious. Plus, his low baritone voice made it all the more funny.

How many years have men been playing women in theatre, especially for the laugh?

All of them. As long as there has been theatre. That's because men in dresses are funny.

And we get a patron complaint. I paraphrase.

"With all of the problem children have to deal with these days, (ugh, these days are no different than those days--people just don't have any memory or knowledge of human history) why do you have to make them watch a transvestite?!?"

[RecoveringKinkoid]

We did an AMAZING production of The Taming of the Shrew in Longstreet (the theater I put the linky to). It was completely sans females. Yes, folks, it was an all-male cast. Kate was a man. Everyone was a man.

Why did we do it that way? Because that was the way Shakespeare himself would have done it. There were no actresses in Shakespeare's day. Women were played by pretty men. And that's how we did it.

I worked costumes for that one. This was not a drag show, we didn't stuff them, or shoehorn their male bodies into female shaped dresses. We built the period Rennaissance gowns to fit very male bodies. These gowns had big shoulders and angular waists. They were cut long to accomodate their height. They were unmistakably men wearing women's clothing.

And it was performed in Longstreet, in the round. Just like in period.

It was a great show. I LOVED it. Man!

That woman's head would have totally exploded.

[Ttam]

We've had so many complaints about content over the years. From reviewers and patrons. Including:

"A barracade full of dead children is completely inappropriate." (Les Miserables: The High School Edition
"Scrooge was a tad too grumpy for the Christmas season" A Christmas Carol
"The blatant racism towards the main black character is inexcusable" To Kill a Mockingbird

And my ALL time favourite, with a little back story. The play version of The Cider House Rules is a six hour long show that includes the following: abortions (shown onstage), groping, violence, racism, mentions of beastiality, dying kids, drug use, and 1 (ONE) 10 second long lesbian kiss. The ONLY complaint we received for the entire run was: "How dare you promote homosexuality on stage!"

You know, one funny incident we had during Les Miz.... We did that show my senior year. During rehearsals, we noticed that the person we'd hired to play piano suddenly stopped showing up. Just... didn't come around anymore. No words of warning or anything. Here one day, gone the next. Of course, we could only afford to have a piano and harp, and the piano was the only one we had actually come to rehearsals until tech so... we suddenly found ourselves having to use recordings to rehearse, which as anyone who's been in a musical knows is rough.

And why the sudden absence? Our piano player had suddenly got religion and decided she took issue with the fact that there is a scene in Les Miserables that involves prostitutes. We had to hire a different piano player....

At my school, I became known as Prop Nazis when I work as ASM. We were doing a production of As You Like It (Shakespeare) and I was the ASM. I had set all the props and the rule is, if it's not your prop, don't touch it.

One prop we had was a sword. One actor decided to take said sword and demonstrate his sword skills. Cookie went from being from being the sweetheart of the theatre department (one professor couldn't imagine me ever saying a curse word, shows what he knew) to being the most feared person on the planet. I didn't even yell, just elevated my voice as I was across the stage and gave the actor a level 10 skunk eye. He tried to arge that he knew what he was doing but Cookie's Will will not be denied. He timidly put the sword back. Suffice to say, there were no prop problems with that production.

Heh. We had one of those too. She was tough, and I loved it. After all, it's nice to know where your props are when you need them.... She'd set up a prop table in the back of all our shows that had butcher paper taped over the top and outlines traced on it to show exactly where every prop should go. And if it wasn't there when the show ended... heaven help you. No one else would.

Still, I did manage to have a double cast one time with a guy who would always not have my props where I needed them.... Drove me right up the wall. Especially since one of them was a measuring tape (Motel from Fiddler on the Roof) that I had hand made with a strip of fabric, a pen, a ruler, and freaking lot of time.

We had a guy making swords when I was working theater for a production of...I wanna say McBeth or Henry or something. Something depressing. Anyway, he was driving us all nuts (I was working scenic/props/costumes ) bragging about how he was forging these weapons himself (he was in a metal working class so one of his projects was to make swords for the production). Opening night, the bloody things shattered like ice during a fight scene, one piece flying across the set and imbedding itself in the low wall surrounding the stage (Shakespearean theater, in the round). Doofus had tempered them just a leeetle too hard. Thank God no one was hurt.

We had that sort of thing happen too, thought it wasn't nearly as potentially lethal. Doing a production of The Fantasticks, this one guy thought it would be a good idea to have real roses for Louisa. Part way into the show, she does one of her dramatic quick turns and the head comes flying off. We used fake from then on.

[ThePhoneGoddess]

In college I did costumes for a production of Lysistrata. That was the most awesome play I have ever been a part of. We had disclaimers on all the playbills, the advertisements in local publications and everything, that NO MINORS WERE ALLOWED due to the extreme sexual content of the play. A friend of mine was working usher and had to deal with a woman who tried to bring 3 kids to the play and had a hissy of monumental proportions when she was denied entrance. Screaming, yelling about 'discrimination' and 'I'll sue', stomping her feet, cussing, kicking furniture, beating her fists on the wall, you name it. Campus security eventually came and dragged her out. The 3 kids looked mortified, we felt bad for them.

After that incident, though, the play went off without a hitch. We had the guys come onstage with long pink balloons stuck in their pants as their penises and the audience roared. There were little old ladies in the audience who were just in tears over how funny it was. I wish I had a recording of that performance.

[Record Store Tough Guy]

And why the sudden absence? Our piano player had suddenly got religion and decided she took issue with the fact that there is a scene in Les Miserables that involves prostitutes. We had to hire a different piano player....

I wonder how she reacted to Mary Magdalene.

[Gawdzillers]

Holy crap, I just had a mid-term on Shakespeare today.
I probably screwed it all up. Which isn't entirely my fault.

We were doing them based on notes we had taken from other students' Powerpoint presentations.

The guy doing Comedy of Errors didn't have a slide for the story. So he had to remember all that crap from the top of his head.

Crappiest-looking notes I ever took, what with all the eraser marks and arrows showing who was with who.

[Ttam]

Well, just went to A Christmas Carol tonight and it reminded me of a few things.....

Cell phones. Oh ye gods and little fishes do I, as someone who has been an actor and had to deal with one going off, hate those damned devices. And who is that person who, after having to listen to that pre-recorded "Please turn off all cell phones and electronic devices, unwrap your candy, and enjoy the show" spiel still manages to have it go off. Who are you and where are you sitting so I can personally turn it into a useless pile of plastic and silicon.

Now, to be fair I have once forgotten to turn off my cell phone. In my defense, though that was at a movie theater, and it was an IMax theater who, apparently, don't have reminders. But at least I had the testicular fortitude and overall worth as a human being to take it out and hang up to make it stop ringing, then turned it off. Had one tonight where the phone went off and they just waited for it to go to voicemail, which was a darned long time. Come on.

Still, I heard this one horror story from a guy at a theater we always used to go to about some woman who not only let her cell phone go off during a performance, she answered the damn thing. Then had an extended conversation. And not only that, but had the gumption to be upset when they kicked her ass out.

[wagegoth]

The personally most embarrassing live theater moment for me was during a mini-play we were presenting as our final for our class. As I was helped up from my faked swooning death, my accomplice, Dave, stepped on the hem of my strapless dress. Yes, it did go that low. Thankfully, I have very good reflexes, caught the top with one arm, covered myself with the other, and safely got off stage. We had to delay the next scene, though, as he'd managed to rip the hem and I had to change into the spare dress I'd brought as backup. This led to some improvisation, as Dave had no idea what had happened, only some of the audience and part of the cast in the wings knew.

[cinema guy]

And why the sudden absence? Our piano player had suddenly got religion and decided she took issue with the fact that there is a scene in Les Miserables that involves prostitutes. We had to hire a different piano player....

And yet Les Mis has one of the most positive Christian messages I can recall seeing. Guy steals a bunch of valuables from a priest and when he is caught, the priest says, 'Oh no, I gave them to him.' And then tells the guy to live his life in a good way. Which he does.

Some people just can't see beyond the obvious.