This is a wonderful thread full of theatrical urban legends. There’s stories about West Side Story, Dracula, Les Misérables, Romeo & Juliet, Peter Pan, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and more:
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I once saw a performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream in which Bottom broke his dagger in the play within the play and basically failed to stab himself. After looking at the broken pieces for a shocked moment, he grabbed Theseus’ goblet, took a swig and announced “I am poisoned!” and proceeded to give his dying monologue while standing up.
The thing is, this one looked so much like a mistake that the actors rolled with, but it was 100% planned!
I once did tech for a murder mystery where at the end of the first act, the main suspect was supposed to give a speech where she announced that she knew who the real killer was, only to be shot right before she revealed the name.
One night, as she came to the close, it sounded like this.
“But I think I know who really killed him-”
(click from backstage as the gun refuses to fire)
For a couple of minutes, she managed to stall and improvise a monologue suggesting that the evidence was there if we REALLY looked carefully, without actually saying who she suspected, until they managed to reload the gun and fired.
So in the ballet La Bayadere, there’s a scene where the whole ballet corp, representing the souls of dead temple dancers, slowly enters the stage on a zigzaging ramp. It’s supposed to be ethereal and graceful and haunting. Apparently in this one production, one of the dancers entering towards the end fell over and the whole corps when down like dominoes.
Not me, not acting, but I feel this belongs here as an example of how a good idea can go really really off the rails. https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/comments/fzd61n/its_that_time_of_year_for_my_favorite_tumblr_post/#lightbox
In my late teens I was in a community theater pirate play called Castaways. The opening number was your typical rollicking pirate song, and one of the choreographed actions was to bring down our plywood swords in a dramatic sweeping motion. My sword broke off at the handle and the blade went whizzing, end over end, into the orchestra pit and hit the wall by the conductor’s ear. Luckily he saw the funny side, and no one else on stage at the time actually noticed, so the play carried on without interruption.
The story is told of an operatic soprano playing Tosca who annoyed the stage crew. For the scene where Tosca dramatically throws herself from the battlements of the castle, there should have been some soft mats for her to land on – but on this occasion the annoyed crew substituted a trampoline, resulting in her bouncing back up a few times.
My father told a story about a play he directed very early in his life. It was some terribly proper British drawing room comedy.
There was a bad storm that night and the power went off. The two actors who were on stage did this.
Have you had any of your drink?
No.
Don’t, I just did and I seem to have gone blind.
Eighth grade play and I’m playing the lead role. During rehearsals, I had the feeling that there was something planned, something I was not party to. So the penultimate scene is me and my bud stopped by a cop while I’m driving a “stolen” car. Bud says that he thinks the radiator has burst when it’s obviously that he’s pissed on his side of the car. The cop comes up, says his lines and suddenly, this sodden cloth goes up from the passenger footwall, across my point of view and right into the cop’s face. All I could do was put my face down on the steering wheel while keeping my laughter in and desperately trying to recover my composure. We got through the rest of the play and we found out that everyone in the audience thought it was a planned part of the play