The show must go on!
The best and worst part of live theatre is its unpredictability. You rehearse for weeks to ensure a consistently superior performance, only to have Murphy raise his ugly head and create general mayhem.
Most people have heard the phrase “the show must go on”. One of its consequences is that no matter what happens onstage, the actors are trained to continue as if nothing unusual has happened.
Sure, if you’re seven years old and playing the King in Snow White and you slam a gate shut, only to have the entire fence fall down due to shoddy construction by your seven-year old buddies, you can get away with saying in a hearty tone “My, my, I’ll have to have someone see to that gate”. In the world of professional theatre, however, it is generally considered bad form to openly acknowledge any onstage mistakes or accidents.
Instead professional actors swing to another extreme.
Case #1:
The lead actor (let’s call him Paul because that was his name) arrived at the theatre extremely ill, sick to his stomach, barely able to walk. And he insisted on going ahead with the performance. (Note this is because he was an actor and therefore a crazy person when it came to this type of decision.) At some point Paul was onstage with one other actor when he could no longer control his nausea. He calmly turned upstage (back to the audience) and with a slight downward turn of his head, vomited in a long stream into a wastebasket that was conveniently part of the set. He then exited the stage.
Imagine being the other actor onstage. The show must go on, right? So the other actor (whom we’ll call David because, well, same reason) began to talk to himself. His character had no history of mental illness, no one ELSE talked to themselves, but what else could he do but pray that someone backstage was paying attention and preparing the next actor to enter as soon as possible?
The end result? That night’s performance was an audience favorite. You see, audiences are very trusting. If something happens onstage, they believe it was planned that way. As a result we received accolades after the show for the realism of the vomiting “special effect”. “How did you do it?”, they asked. “It was so real!” they exclaimed. And we, with our wise producer smiles, nodded mysteriously and swore we could not reveal our trade secret. Implying, of course, that we had a patent on how to make an actor throw up on cue. The secret? Feed him undercooked chicken at a dive diner for lunch.
Next week: “The show must go on!”, continued