We recently did Harvey. Our dress went perfect...should have known something would happen during the show nights.  In the Sanitarium, there is supposed to be a buzzer on the wall. Every night during the show that darn buzzer fell off. Even though we did everything we could to get it to stay up there. The actors came to expect it to fall off and handled it beautifully when it did. That and our main curtain broke and we had to have someone hold it back during the entire second scene!  poor guy!

As a side note. I never let actors deal with thier own props (TD for high school kids) This came while doing "You can't take it with you" which has tons of props. Too easy for them to get lost. All actors come to us for thier props. I have my stage manager (or myself) set all the prop tables. Works well for us.

Aimee

Techies never flub.  Ever.  Not. Ever.

Certainly not in any production I have ever worked, or any production I ever will work, in any capacity.

I say this with some confidence, because I have seen what they can do to people who suggest that they DO flub, and son, it ain't pretty.

That said, I was in attendance at a certain production of Gypsy many years ago -- in a third world country, let us say -- where during the audition for Zigfield-or-whoever-it-is, the phone rang, the actress picked it up, said "Hello", and the phone continued to ring.  Three more times.

This was the same production in which the troupe was unable to cast a male chorus.  So they didn't use one.  Which meant they cut "All I Need Now Is The Girl" and the surrounding dialog, among other things, leaving some rather large holes in the plot.

This was the same production in which the staff never tested their strobe effect (for the newsboys number, when the girls grow up) until opening night.  Opening night.

They knew their Baby June was epileptic, but didn't think there'd be a problem . . .

Pow.  Out cold on stage.  (She came out just fine.)

Not the greatest company I've ever seen.

Not actually a techie, but a fellow castmate, that goofed, but it involves a prop, so I'll tell it anyway.  We were doing The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder.  Anyone familiar with the play knows that there's a purse that changes hands many times in the show.  At one point, Malachi Stack (my character) finds it, pulls out a huge stack of money which he shows to the audience, and then explains why he'll return the purse to its owner in a great little monologue.  I had an old-fashioned money bag that I'd had to buy for another show some time before, so we were going to use that.  I stuck a wad of bills in there before the show, and handed it off to the actor playing Vandergelder (who is the first actor to have it).  He "lost" it before the show (he found it eventually, but after the performance), so, with 5 minutes to curtain, we managed to borrow a very modern-looking wallet from a stagehand, as well as a measly 3 dollars.  No wonder Malachi gave it back!