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« on: Oct 24, 2007, 06:15 pm »
I've had a couple... I'm an event manager for a campus theater. We get all sorts of things. Dance concerts, pageants, you name it.
Sometime last spring, our main rag started having issues. If you opened or closed it too quickly, the ropes would fall off the pulleys. Since our backstage crew consists of whoever the client brings in, it's difficult to get them to pull the curtain a bit slower. Until it falls off the track in the middle of a show. When that happens, we clear the performers offstage, pull up the house lights, and my crew (all two of us) bolt down to the stage, pull out the ladder, put the rope back on all the pulleys, strike it, run back upstairs, thank the audience, and get going. Thankfully, I think we've fixed it. (knock wood)
The last time I had to stop a show was due to one of my crew. She was new, belligerent as could be, since she's about my same age and has 'worked in so many professional theaters'. We were running a Junior Miss pageant. I asked her a few times to check her cds. We had only one rehearsal, like ya do for things like this and I wanted her to be absolutely certain she was ready. (Being a pageant, we had about 27.) So. First time I asked her 'Yes'. Second time "YES" Third time (almost yelling at me) "YES I've checked my cds!" ... I'm sure you can guess where this is going... We get the show started. The MC announces the girls for their opening number. We go to black. "standby lights and sound... lights and sound -" "I DON'T HAVE MY CD" "... Excuse me?" The pageant director came running up after a couple of seconds, told us she had another one. She didn't want us to bring the girls offstage so we could bring house lights back up. So I went on the godmic and announced that the show would continue momentarily. By the time we got the cd and cued it up, the audience had been sitting in black for 6 minutes.
PS... she doesn't work for me anymore.
I've never had to stop an actual play... though I have had light boards keel on me. It happened once during the prologue of a show. It was a small theater and it was not a really structured show... so I used my flashlight on the performer while my op booted the board back up. I was told that the same board had done that a few times... I realized later that it was because the op would kick the plugs under the board... The theater has since fixed that problem.