The wrong way to involve the audience...
Let me take you back a few years...1990 something-or-other to be precise. The production that we were putting on was Benjamin Brittens 'Noyes Fludde', the charming story of Noah and his building of the ark and starting the worlds first zoo - complete with petting area...or something like that. I'm presuming that nobody had the heart to pick Mr. Britten up on his spelling.

I, for my sins, played in the 'orchestra'; about 8 people on varied instruments. We also brought in a couple of brass players from another school, just for good measures.

Rehersals had gone smoothly; the actors new their lines, the musicians sounded fine, the set and props were all sorted. Perhaps this was the problem. Perhaps we got cocky.

We move on to the opening night and we're playing to a full house. Mothers and fathers sit, cameras poised, waiting to catch their darling offspring doing something other than spraying graffiti on the wall of the local off-license; siblings waiting to catch sight of their brothers and siters poncing about on stage so they can riddicule them at length later. The lights go down and the performance begins. We get to the interval and everything is going swimmingly. A quick break to refresh ourselves and back on we went. This was where disaster struck.

Second half, Noah has built the Ark and is, quite literally, singing it's praises.
The Ark as it was consisted of a big piece of paper painted up to represent the side view of a boat and a cardboard tube for the mast. Now don't get me wrong. This isn't the kind of cardboard tube you find in your everyday toilet paper, far from it. This tube was between 10 and 12 feet tall and as thick as your thigh...if you reasonably thick thighs that is. How, I hear you ask, did we fix this uber-tube to the ground? Glue? Rivets? Nope. We had somebody squat down and hold it...for the rest of the second half. Unfortunatly, the boy in question couldn't keep it up all night(though I believe he taking tablets now to remedy this) and the mast of the Ark toppled...straight into the audience. Fortunatly, the mast remained undamaged and we were able to use it for the rest of the performances. This is mainly because the mast landed on a young lady and her even younger child. Imagine the hush that settled over the place. It didn't last long. From the back of the hall one of the trombonists exclaimed "Oh my god, they've killed a baby - classic!" and then proceded to burst into a fit of laughter.

True professionals we were, we scraped the child of the tube and finished the performance.




:D
(Leoricx, Fri 2 Dec 2005, 20:23, Reply)