So I was stunned to hear that some professionals on Broadway have no prejudice against stopping a show dead in its tracks in order to fix something!  Our director attended a Broadway show two weeks ago where this very thing happened!  

 

She was watching the Broadway musical "In the Heights" when one actor's body mike died.  Moments later more mikes went out.  Suddenly the stage manager came over the "God mike" and said, "We are calling a stop.  Actors leave the stage".   My friend said even the actors on stage looked stunned!   

 

The audience sat quietly for 10 minutes.  The crew fixed the sound problems. The show continued.  They restarted that entire scene again from the top!  Apparently, the words missed by the audience were so critical to the story that the staff must have deemed it necessary to "do a retake", like in a motion picture.  (Or maybe it was because they had moving light cues or additional canned music that required "rebooting" from the top of the scene).  I don't know. 

 

Anyway, my director friend admits she did appreciate the restart in hindsight, noting that, "when tickets cost 100 bucks each, it's good to get your money's worth!"  She also said she attended a recent Broadway production of "Curtains" when the show was stopped for technical problems too. 

 

Wow, this is a new concept in my book.  I have always taken pride in the fact that my crew can "solve issues on the fly".  And historically, that's part of the excitement and thrill of live theatre...isn't it?  I have joked with my tech crew that, "the only reason I will stop this show is if someone dances into the orchestra pit and needs an ambulance!"

 

Have any of you ever found it necessary to stop a show? 

 

And what is your opinion on major Broadway musicals stopping to fix something?  

 

Thanks, Dana

That was for A Chorus Line,  when an audiancemember fell &  split open her face on one of the arms of a seat.

I called for house lights & we had an impromtu interval, luckly thier was a nurse, sitting near the Lady & gave first aid.

I ran from the bio box to the foyer & called an ambulance, whn I asked the FOH Manager, where the first aid box was. She become rather indignant & admonished me for stopping the show. Rewfusing to furnish the kit & just going off at me. I latter found out the first aid box was at her home. So I didn't miss her latter.

The Ambulance took about 20 minutes & I stood out at the corner of the street & used my maglite to flag it down.

The whole thing took about 40 minutes & the cast started from the same the scene sequence, prior to where it stopped.

 

 

 

 

All we singers just sort of trickled off finally realizing it was the fire alarm and FORTUNATELY the fire curtain didn't drop.  BUT we DID have to vacate the building. And this was the Fine Arts Building where the theaters were housed. SO here we are in this ungodly weird Sweeney makeup, standing outside the theater near the streets (of course it was on campus BUT these were also city streets as well), people driving by wondering what all these weirdos in period costumes and weird makeup were doing standing outside with 5 fire trucks, mind you, arriving to put out a non-existent fire, with AUDIENCE outdoors as well.  Finally after they inspected the building and deemed it habitable, after 40 minutes, we ALL trucked back inside, including audience (we never lost an audience member to this fiasco) we restarted the show (with a little LESS smoke this time) and curtain opened and the audience for whatever reason was in our hands and went right along with us for a great opening night and run of the show.

 

As for stopping anything else, only one I can recall where someone had a heart attack for real and that ended that show for the evening.  Person survived and it was only mild but it happens.

 

TonyDi

 

 

Another time (different time and place) we had to stop and evacuate because of a bomb threat.  It was a false alarm but the search, etc took a very long time, so that performance was cancelled.

 

I was an audience member when a smoke machine set off the fire alarm.  The entire audience of 1500 people had to leave the building for about a half hour until the fire department gave the "all-clear" and let us re-enter.

 

 

Luckily there were a few building sites handy, with used unwanted lenghts of shadecloth in rubbish skips.

We grabbed them & covered the tin roof with the shade cloth. It was about 3M wide in various lenghts upto 50M rolls. Dury rigged it with ropes to pull it over the roof. it was a tempory measure that later became perminant. It cut out the niose of the rain in winter & also reduced the heat effect of sun in the summer time.

 

The worst thing?  We were only 8 minutes from the end of Act 1.  We were in the basement for almost an hour, we went back upstairs, backed up just a bit, did the last 10 minutes of Act 1, then went to intermission!  It was I Hate Hamlet, which has a huge scene change at intermission, or we would have only taken a break long enough to get costumes changed after all that time in the basement. 

That particular venue only seated around 100 people, so it was managable.  If we had been in the main venue (2500 seats), everyone in the auditorium would have stayed in their seats, while crew and actors went to the basement. 

Marsha 

 

Other than that one show, I have not been involved with a show that was stopped during performance, though there have been many painful scene changes in my career.....

 

The only time I actually stopped a show was during a production of "Sunshine Boys". We were at the scene where they had just gotten back together and were talking in the kitchen. I soon noticed there was more talking going on in the front row than on stage and the actors were quite distracted. I stole down to the front row and discovered an older lady having a seizure. I stood and made the announcement from the floor while the house manager called for the ambulance. Ten minutes later, having been removed by the ambulance crew through the side exit near her seat, the show went on again.

 

Most recently, I was concerned that I might have to stop the show during our last year's Christmas show. We were doing the comedy, A Charles Dickens Christmas Carol, A Traveling Travesty in Two Tumultuous Acts. My wife was playing the role of Christmas Past. The scene calls for her to kind of dance/float back and forth across the stage while the clock chimes.  Her comic routine that night resulted in a misplaced foot that took her right of the edge of our thrust stage and into our SR seats were she face first landed on a chair arm. Though it is only about a foot and a half drop, she was going fairly fast and I thought for sure we would be carrying her out of the audience. Trooper that she is, she jumped up, licked the blood from her lip, smiled and carried on like nothing happened. She finished the scene, and not till she came off stage would you know anything had gone wrong as she cried out for a rag to stem the bleeding. her main concern was she was about to go right back on after the scene change! Thats my girl.. Many audience members actually thought it was part of the show..