The Curious Incident - at the theatre...

At the pre-West end try-out of Guys And Dolls in Manc (possibly opening night, can't remember) there was a very curious incident involving David Haig.

Shortly after his entrance he put his hands to his head and went
"AARRRRRRRRGH!"
Then stormed off stage.

Curtain came down and the audience were left with repeated "technical difficulties/resume in 10 minutes" announcements which went on for a good 40 mins.

Eventually the the director come on stage (lots of peering into the audience with hand shielding his eyes from lights... cliche!) and said DH had a "migraine" and the part would be played by his understudy and please be kind because he had never actually done a full run through.

Needless to say the understudy was amazing and got a huge ovation at the end. From the bit we had seen of Haig he was better.

I think DH had forgotten his lines and had a luvvie strop but that's just me

At the NT's production of 'Rocket to the Moon' (I think that's what it was called?!) Keeley Hawes shut the door with such vigour that the handle fell off and nobody could open it again. After a scene and a bit of walking around it the other actor (I forget who) paused and said "The door is fairly integral to the rest of the scenes I think we'd better see if we can fix it" Stage management came, tried and failed....so they carried on walking around it for the rest of the play.

As it happened I did the NT backstage tour the next day and when we commented on it to the tour guide she said 'I thought it wasn't supposed to be like that'

Another NT classic was Rory Kinnear in Hamlet, who had an unfortunate incident with a tap coming off in his hands and squirting water all over his trousers in an unfortunate location. He quipped 'should have been a plumber' before wiping himself down a bit and carrying on. Poor Adrian Lester in 'hiding' for this scene must have wondered what on earth had on. Some poor dresser must have done a mad dash around the NT because he came back in dry trousers the next time he was off stage.

Just another reason to love Rachel Tucker!

At Showboat at the Crucible there were two incidents where the Cottonblossom got stuck as it was moved in and out. On both occasions a member of the crew came out and spoke to the audience to explain while the actors passed the time by speaking to audience members, in character, saying things like "what do you think is wrong?" "do you think everything's ok?" "I hope it's nothing serious" etc.

Cute.


Speaking of crew, is there a theatre law that they must always wear black jeans and a black t-shirt to go with their black headset and clipboard? Is it like "dress in black and you're invisible to mortals" or something? 

Fact time!

The popular image of the ninja is that they wear entirely black outfits so they blend into shadows. Blending into the background is what a ninja was supposed to achieve, but in everyday Japan, you'd be better off dressing as a farmer or any sort of ordinary person if you wanted to not draw attention to yourself. The one place where you would see a ninja dressed all in black would be in the theatre, where their black ensemble made them look like they weren't even a part of the cast, just a stagehand, until they suddenly leapt out and became a part of the action. So the ninja outfit as we understand it nowadays isn't some sort of cool martial arts uniform, it's actually just what Japanese stage crews wear.

It's so people won't mistake them for mere actors.