Funny bloopers from your own shows

[SallyBrown]

Posted: 5/4/05 at 10:43pm

I know we had a thread on this a while back, but I'm reviving a new one because I was looking back on some DVDs of past shows I was in, and couldn't but laugh at what we did. laugh in a good way that is.

2 from Peter Pan:

- Hook's microphone drops and the amazing person as this actor is says in his Hook accent, "Smee...fix that" and points to hte microphone

God that was priceless

and then when I was Mrs. darling before I was Wendy, I had to say to Peter in the end "But, Peter, I shall let her go to you once a year for a week to do your spring cleaning" and instead I said it the other way around so I sorta went "well...maybe only once a year for a week, I know you'll miss her but if I should send her to you once a week for a year, it would be an awful long time since I saw her again. And since you did not carry her around for 9 months and then gave birth to her in a tight sitting room, I suggest you listen to Mummy Darling."

Let's just say the guy playing Peter was trying to shrug and yet not laugh at the same time. Funny funny outcome

[timote316]

Posted: 5/4/05 at 11:03pm

My high school did 'Bus Stop' for their fall play this past fall. The girl playing Cherie lost her place during one of her longer stories she was telling, and the kid playing the older gentleman (whose name is escaping me) covered by leaning into the conversation (as if eavesdropping), completely in character, saying "Well, c'mon now, it was just getting good!" It was very funny.

Same kid, different show: Man of La Mancha. He was playing Quixote. In an early scene, he couldn't get something out of his pocket, as he wasn't quite used to the armor. After a long pause, he announced "they just don't make armor like they used to," and then called upon Sancho to retrieve the item from his pocket. Also very funny.

Only real story I have involving me is from 'Guys and Dolls'. During "Luck be a Lady", our Skye walked in and out of the crapshooters, giving them money. Well, after he moved on from me, he dropped the entire stack of money, but couldn't stop to pick it up, obviously. So, realizing that this money would have to stay on stage for the next few scenes, I pounced on it, scooping up as much as possible and stuffed it in my pockets. Luckily, other people did the same, so I didn't look like a complete idiot.

[SallyBrown]

Posted: 5/4/05 at 11:08pm

heh, I remember when I did Sally Brown, it was the scene where I get lots of valentines and Charlie gets none, so the guy playing Charlie decides to be annoying that night and puts stuff in hsi eyes to make him cry. i mean BAWL which wasnt in the script, he was supposed to go on with his scene. So there he is just crying as though someone died, and trying to cover up the fact that we'd have to cover a whole entire scene, I say "charlie brown its ok, have one of mine." and i give him a couple of mine. he grasps them running and sobbing off stage.

So I'm left there when it should have been that Charlie was talking about the red headed girl, so not knowing what I'm supposed to do I say "Oh come ON. I'm not even 5 and I know not to cry about valentines!"

it was awful. worst cover up I could have ever done. but they brought down the lights on me and skipped to the next scene.

woops

[BwayBaby18]

Posted: 5/4/05 at 11:10pm

Durign a production of Anything Goes! i was tap dancign on a piano durign the song Anything Goes.... well i attempted to do my triples when i fall off the back and flat on my but... the girl playing Reno comes over to me helps me up and said "that is the kind of man i want, someone who throws himself into his art"

[SallyBrown]

Posted: 5/4/05 at 11:11pm

HA

[ShuQ]

Posted: 5/4/05 at 11:14pm

Frasier fell of the stage!

[Caroline-Q-or-TBoo]

Posted: 5/4/05 at 11:16pm

oooh, i've got a story. in 4th grade my school did its first ever musical called Sing America Sing. it was stupid and told the history of america. I had a monolouge as Jimmy Carter in the middle of the show. i swear, this was the most boring show i've ever seen/been in! I saw people sleeping. lots of people. well i go to the mike and its too short so i raise it up. it droops back down. mild laughter. i do it again, it flies back down. more laughter. i do this around five times until a just squat and say my monolouge. ive been told it was the best part of the show..:-P

[gavrochegirl]

Posted: 5/4/05 at 11:17pm

In The Foreginer, we were going to have one of those old-fashioned phones on the wall...unfortunately, the phone decided not to stay on the wall and just fall apart. While other crew members were trying to fix the phone, the actor, a brillant improviser and makes great cover-ups, made one of those phone signs with his hand,and "hung up the phone". LOL...

[Dreamcatcher]

Posted: 5/4/05 at 11:30pm

In a scene I was doing with two guys, one of them tosses an orange on the floor and the other kid is supposed to jump on top of it on his chest using a pillow as padding (trying to imitate a possible bomb scenario to see how the kid would react...long story :-P fun scene though) and he landed chest first on the orange and it just exploded. Thankfully none of it flew far enough to hit the audience but it went all over him and the pillow and floor around him. Me and the other guy even got slightly sprayed by pulp and juice. Audience thought it was supposed to happen and laughed alot but the look of shock on his face as he stood up covered in orange bits was priceless. :-P

[Elphaba3]

Posted: 5/4/05 at 11:33pm

When I was in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the guy playing Bottom completely forgot one of his entrances and almost screwed up the sscene. The other "mechanicals" were pissed at the time, but it's funny now. If actually worked....sort of.

[Overthemoon6]

Posted: 5/5/05 at 12:49am

Luckily this wasn't in my cast, but in the other cast of Little Women at our school, the boy who was playing Laurie didn't feel well (he had been vomitting before the show), and he fainted onstage. Luckily we had very few boys, so his double had been an extra in that cast and was in full makeup and ready to go on. Also, in another cast of The Sound of Music, it was the first time that the drama department had decided to use a track to sing with. Well, the tech people didn't come to enough rehearsals to know which songs were which, so as my friend (who also played Maria) was waiting to do the waltz w/ the captain (you know the part where they're falling in love), they start playing Sixteen Going on Seventeen, then Do-re-mi, and then My Favorite things before finally getting it right. Thank goodness they didn't do that for my performances.

[Overthemoon6]

Posted: 5/5/05 at 12:54am

Oh, i forgot to mention. In that same cast, right before Maria and the kids run across the stage before Do-re-mi (in the movie where they were hanging from the trees), the Liesl had been talking about saying something like "his name is Rolf, and we are going to get married and have babies" where they are supposed to adlib. Well, as she ran across, she completely forgot to say the first part, and instead said "And Rolf and I are going to have babies..." It was sooooooo funny. Somehow I got in trouble for it though, even though it wasn't even my cast.

Updated On: 9/14/05 at 12:54 AM

[Aigoo]

Posted: 5/5/05 at 1:12am

Guys and Dolls: Sky throws the big mafia dude's gun to Nathan, and he didn't catch it. Then the guys were sort of gathering around it like a snake and finally picked it up. I dunno. I thought it was pretty clever. Quick thinking.

[frontrowcentre2]

Posted: 5/5/05 at 1:53am

A friend of mine was cast in a College production of EQUUS playing Alan. If you don't know the play, the final scene requires him to take his girlfriend to the barn, undress and attempt to have sex with her...only he can't with his beloved horse making noise a few feet away. Alan then has to play rest of the scene nude.

Well my friend gets to dress rehearsal when they finally actually try the nude scene..he removes his pants and underwear and is sporting a major erection! The run of that play remains one of his most embarassing moments... only with supreme concentration could he avoid the problem in performances!

Probably explains why few colleges attempt EQUUS!

Updated On: 5/5/05 at 01:53 AM

[neelyohara]

Posted: 5/5/05 at 2:45am

Over the course of high school, I managed to...
-fall flat on my backside onstage (as Betty Blast, the burger shop owner in Footloose...they had me on rollerskates...bad idea)
-lose my wig while singing "And All That Jazz" dancing on top of a piano
-get picked up by a drop that was flying out (the big huge giant metal bar that rigged the darn thing caught on the edge of my dress and before I knew it I was up in the air; I was five or six feet off the ground before someone pulled me down...scared the bejeezus out of me)
But my favorite blooper happened my junior year of high school when we did ...And the World Goes 'Round. My best friend and another girl were onstage singing "The Grass is Always Greener," the duet between the movie star and the housewife, and they're going back and forth and the housewife is supposed to say to the movie star, "Do YOU know Barbara Walters? That's wonderful!" But for whatever reason, the girl playing the movie star blanked on her verse and said to my best friend the housewife "Do YOU know Barbara Walters? That's wonderful!" and all of us sitting backstage were like OH HOLY CRAP. They covered for it somehow, but the girl who played the movie star never lived it down and for the rest of the year we teased her with "Hey, Emily, do YOU know Barbara Walters?!?!"

[carlobarlo]

Posted: 5/5/05 at 3:00am

I was in a version of Little Women the Musical in Chicago and we were doing a performance for a "Selected audience"... just a couple of producers and some directors... and the cast was all annoyed that we had to do the show because it wasn't originally on the schedule. We had a manequin head backstage with one of Jo's wigs on it and we thought it would be funny if we brought it on and pretended it was Beth since she was dead. So in the last scene when We're all singing the finale Hannah the maid walks in with the head on a platter and we all stopped and said... "Poor Beth" and then kept singing. I guess this isn't really a blooper, but it was funny. The director didn't think so, but nobody got fired(whew).

[DTBG2]

Posted: 5/5/05 at 3:21am

I was in Little Shop of Horrors, i played Seymour.

We got tangled in the phone choreography while singing "Closed for renovation" and it was hilarious. The phone lines became all knotted up and we dropped phones, and it was a big mess. For the rest of the scene, we were soo shocked we flubbed up our lines. I called her April instead of Audrey...lol..it was stupid...i hate that song now everytime i hear it..brings back embaressing moments..

[ashley0139]

Posted: 5/5/05 at 7:12am

I was AD for YAGMCB. Our Charlie Brown had this thing where every once in a while, for some reason, he would mix up his words in "The Doctor is In" In one show he said: "I stand like a stick or I cough or I sneeze or I don't bring a present or I STEAL the ice cream." It is supposed to be SPILL the ice cream. That was just too funny.

[mikewood]

Posted: 5/5/05 at 9:25am

This wasn't funny at the time, and it wasn't my show but it's a story worth telling.

A friend of mine was doing a show ... I want to say "Company"....and managed to shatter a glass in his hands with predictable results. (I can only imagine it was damaged and stressed because all he did was pick it up.)

Anyway, it was ugly and dripping and during a number...he changed his blocking and put his hand through an open window and at the end of the song brought his hand back inside completely bandaged, gauzed and taped!

He finished the show and got twelve stiches afterwards.

In a similar...eh... VEIN (sorry!), I was in the audience another time when another friend of mine was the lead in "Butterflies are Free." In the scene near the end when the main character breaks down and throws some dishes and kitchen stuff into the sink, a fork bounces up and nails him between the eyes. He finishes the play with blood seeping down his face. Ironically, there is a line about blood near the very end of the play and he played it for macabre laughs.

The shows go on.

[mikewood]

Posted: 5/5/05 at 9:44am

*I was Ed in "You Can't Take With You" and in a departure from the script, they couldn't get a Donald so I got most of his lines so it was my character not Donald's who got sent for groceries. Anyway, one night I had a problem; the bag was ripped so the prop person and I were scrambling around. I got to the door and listened to see where they were at and they had totally gotten sidetracked and one of the actors was improvising a monologue about flowers. The stage manager came careening around the corner and gave me one of those "silent screams" that stage managers do so well to "GET OUT THERE." Apparently, I had missed my entrance.

The drama gods have a way of balancing the scales however:

*In my very next show, I was "Lt. Rooney" in Arsenic and Old Lace. I have a bit where I'm berating some of my officers and then gesture upstairs to "go get the guy who blows the bugle." The gag is that while I order the cops to get Teddy he shows up next to me and salutes me and I turn and discover him. I turn: no Teddy! The two other guys just stare at me and now it's my turn to improvise a monologue. Since one of the running bits in the show is the killer who looks like Boris Karloff, I make up a bit about once I had to track a killer who looked like BELA LUGOSI. So after about 90 seconds of stumbling, bumbling improv on my part, the guy playing Mortimer makes his entrance early and we do his bit. The guy playing Teddy shows up and we go back and his bit and then SOMEHOW we got on track.

So the next night, one of the guys relays this comment from his wife. "Wow, it was a great show, but it was toobad LT ROONEY didn't know his lines, HE SEEMED TO MAKING THEM UP AS HE WENT ALONG!"

[mikewood]

Posted: 5/5/05 at 9:58am

This a great thread; some other tidbits:

*Last winter I was directing "Miracle on 34th Street" in a multi-use facility including a roll down screen for movies. Something happened back stage, and the movie screen scrolled down and then back up during DURING A SCENE. Funny thing was, my blood pressure did something very similar.

*Early this Spring, I was "Mr. Gilmer" in "To Kill a Mockingbird." The set was on a platform about two feet off the ground and the court room set was pushed up right to the edge of the stage. Anyway, there was this drunk obnoxious couple in the front row and they actually tried to trip me when I got up and went to examine a witness. During the scene change, I "accidentally" spilled my water on them....oops! Only in community theater.

*Last summer, I was "Arnold Wiggins" in "The Boys Next Door." It's a show with several cuts back and forth to different scenes and constant light cues. So I come out for one of my little monologues and no light. Instead they skip my light cue and went to the next one but I know the actor in the next bit has a costume change and probably isn't ready to go. So I improvise...."Psssst. Lucien, turn on the light I've got something to tell you...." and I continue. After a beat, the lights come on.

I love stories......!

[Imchristine4real]

Posted: 5/5/05 at 10:22am

It wasn't really funny but I was in "I Rememeber Mama" and we had this goregous antique phone on a post in one of the scenes. Well, the last night, the post falls over. Now maybe it wouldn't have been a big deal but the post was maybe 10 feet high and very, very heavy. It cracked that beautiful phone all over. Actually, the funny part was my dad's face. He was in the front row and when he saw it start to fall he starts to jump up to try to save it but he was too late and it fell with a crash. That's the end.

[mikewood]

Posted: 5/5/05 at 10:31am

oh a couple more:

*I was playing "Herman Merkle" in "Suitehearts". There's a scene where I bring a roll-away cot into the hotel suite. It gets snagged on the rug so I have to back up and lift it. When I lift it two wheels fall off and I end up very ungracefully forcing the cot into its spot.

*In some brilliant writing, "Suitehearts" has Herman put a COOKED steak over his eye to soothe a black eye. ??? One night somehow the kitchen gets locked up, and the SM improvises with sausage patties. Tell me: Have ANY OF YOU ever had freshly cooked sausage juice in your eyes? Not a good scene. The audience loved it....SADISTS!

*I recently directed "Fool for Love". There is a quick bang bang scene where a car pulls up, shoots a gun and shatters a windshield. So you're supposed to hear the car, see the ehadlights, hear the shot, and hear the windshield shatter. My "brilliant" idea was to have the cue with the car followed by a pause in which the stage manager fires a starter's pistol and then the glass. One night the gun clicks once, clicks twice and then fires. The audience hears CAR...pause...glass shattering ...and then the gun shot that shatters the glass! .....guh!

[innocentchoirboy]

Posted: 5/5/05 at 11:03am

My Fair Lady, Eighth grade, I was Higgins

Blooper #1:
It's dress rehersal, Liza and I have memorized every scene EXCEPT the Gazebo scene. So she has this big speech, and i'm leaning on the gazebo, and she looks at me: I have no idea what my line is, neither does she. so we stand there staring at each other for about thirty seconds, then Liza says "Well, why don't you say something?" and very calmly i reply "Well, Liza, I don't quite know what to say." the audience was rolling on the floor laughing (it was an open dress rehersal).

Blooper #2
same musical, it's the intense fight between Higgins and liza, and i'm about to call her some offensive thing and throw the ring, and from no where we hear "YOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU did it!". Pickering's mike was still on, and he was singing in the dressing room. we kept going, but the emotion was gone. the next scene pickering says "i hope i didn't keep you up with my singing last night. catchy song wasn't it?"

Blooper #3
During dress rehersal, our costumes weren't quite finished being fitted. during Show Me, eliza's dress was held on by safty pins. well, she made it through the entire song, but on "NOOOOOWWWW" at the end, she raises her arms....and down falls her skirt. oh dear.

The Sound Of Music
Blooper #1
It is infinitely harder to get out of a Tux than it is to get into one. so Maria and Capt. come back, but wait -- where's the Capt.? still in the dressing room changing out of my tux, that's where. the kids, stalling for time, asked "Where's Father?". now, Maria was not the best at Improv. her response was "He's....In the Bathroom." oh yes. i wanted to strangle her. i eventually made it on stage, to thunderous applause.

Blooper #2
the kids run through the auditorium....and into a pile of music stands. chaos and giggling ensues.

Bugsy Malone
Blooper #1
I was some cop, i forget what his name was, but i had to "Accidently" pour talc powder over my captain. the next scene, a mobster dies, and Fat Sam slides to his side on his knees.... and slides right off the stage.

[freelancer]

Posted: 5/5/05 at 11:09am

In my high school days we did Anything Goes. We had a hydraulic pit, so we built sets for the staterooms on the pit floor and raised it and lowered it as needed. Moonface opened the door to one of the staterooms, walked in, and the set promptly tilted and fell backwards. His next line was "There's definitely something wrong here!" The place when nuts. We were mortified, but the show must go on.

The next year we did Leader of the Pack. In the wedding scene, Ellie was supposed to go through the ceremony; then I was to pull the train off her dress and she was to pull off her veil and hand it to me. In final dress (where parents were allowed to come and take pictures of us on stage), she handed me not only her veil, but also her bee-hive wig. She played the whole next scene with a leg of pantyhose from under her wig on her head. Props to her for not losing it! I certainly did.

Updated On: 5/5/05 at 11:09 AM