UFO Snafu

When it comes down to it, the difference between a live performance and a prerecorded one is that when it’s live if something goes wrong everybody sees it. When you pop a CD into your stereo the band gets it right every time. But put the same band up on stage... if that guitar player trips over his cable and falls on his face it’s not going to sound pretty and there won’t be any hiding it.

The “magic of theatre” happens when the band makes it look easy; when the juggler keeps all the balls in the air; when the dancer glides down the stairway and never misses a step. At the beginning of the show, when we fade the lights and raise the curtain, we are essentially uttering the most powerful incantation of theatre magic: When dump the houselights and haul out the grand rag we are saying to the audience, “Watch this!”.

Not coincidentally, these are also the most famous of famous last words.

Pretty much without exception our preference at AHT is for our audience to see us "making it look easy". The audience for the first preview of TUNA CHRISTMAS, however, got to see us make it look hard.

To set the scene.... We’re midway through Act 2. Didi Snavely has just told her husband, R.R. that her Christmas wish is that "one of your UFO's would pick you up tonight and haul your dead weight off to kingdom come.” R.R. crosses left to right, whistling “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”. We hear the sound of an approaching UFO and a whirling light effect sweeps across the stage to hit R.R. downstage right. As R.R. looks upstage a lighted model spaceship (two large foodservice type colanders with a lightbulb inside and pieces of acrylic rod sticking out all over them) descends from the catwalks.

Okay, right. So if you were here for the Thursday 11/6 performance, here’s what you were supposed to see. You were supposed to see a chunk of the set wall flip down to become a four step stairway leading up into a small chamber lined with gold shimmer curtain, pulsing lights and smoke. R.R. was supposed to walk up the ramp, do a double armed “to heck with you” wave in Didi’s general direction. Then you were supposed to see the ramp close behind him.

Usually this gets a good laugh, and some applause.

Now, if you weren’t here for the Thursday 11/6 performance, here’s what you missed. The door in the wall opened about 2 inches and stuck. R.R. stood downstage right looking puzzled. Smoke began to emerge from above the set. After a few moments the door in the wall bumped a couple times but didn’t open any further. R.R. crossed upstage to the door and knocked on it. The door bumped a couple more times, obviously hopelessly stuck. Jim J. Bullock as R.R., improvising a line to cover his exit, said “That’s okay, I’ll come in the back door”, and exited upstage right. After a moment the model UFO flew up into the catwalks.

For the record, Jim J.'s ad-lib got a good laugh, and some applause.

After that, nothing really worked right for a few minutes. The turntable bringing Vera Carp’s Christmas tree out for the next scene was late coming out, and then late leaving. When the turntable was late revolving off, that threw off John-Michael Zuerlein’s timing as he tried to exit as Vera in her motorized wheelchair which caused him bump into a wall as he went out the door. And then the turntable for Pearl’s christmas tree didn’t work.

Really, we love to make an audience laugh, but this isn’t how we like to do it.

After the show, I went backstage to ask the crew what had happened. As expected, I found out that until the ramp stuck everything was fine, and that after the ramp stuck everything that went wrong happened because crewpeople who had been trying to troubleshoot the stuck ramp had gotten out of position and were playing catch-up.

As for why the ramp stuck, the answer was devilishly simple. Following the afternoon rehearsal the carpentry crew had come in to make a change to the stairs that the actor comes down backstage after going up the ramp onstage. When they screwed the new step unit into place the tail end of the pull rope used to raise and lower the ramp got pinched between a couple of pieces of wood. The carpenter didn’t think to test the ramp before leaving, after all he’d only worked on the steps; the crew didn’t think to test the ramp before showtime, after all it had worked fine all day.

Fixing the problem took about two minutes. The devil’s always in the details. You think you’ve got everything covered and then you get blindsided by a something simple.

Lots of times people talk about the “magic of theatre” to describe bits of technical wizardry: but all that stuff is just a bag of tricks. The truth is that any magic that happens in the theatre is something that hangs in the air between the audience and the performer.

Stagecraft has no magic to offer. Every so often you lower the lights, raise the curtain, say, “Watch this!”, and the balls get dropped and the actor falls down the stairs on top of his guitar. What’s cool, though, is when the real "theatre magic" survives the technical snafu. The room is dead quiet. The actor gets up, dusts off the guitar, says, “And now, for my next trick”, and it brings the house down laughing. Now that’s something....