So as promised a few more Show Stop Stories.
1) I've had to interrupt a fringe show. I was running one of Eric Davis' Red Bastard shows when my booth phone rings. It's the
house manager, who says a Police Officer has arrived and has reason to believe someone was in the audience, and this person's
house was burning down and they needed to talk to them IMMEDIATELY. I interrupted the show and kindly asked the person to go out to the
lobby. Never did end up hearing much more of the story, but always wondered. Thankfully only a brief interruption, but to a show that requires an extreme amount of rather awkward audience participation. The show asks some pointed questions about fidelity, sex, sexual orientation and the nature of love.
2) Another fringe show I had with an extreme amount of lighting, sound and video cues, when a huge storm hit and blacked out part of the city. At my
theatre the
power is only out for about 20 seconds, and we (as everyone should) have
UPS' for our computers and consoles. However sometime before fringe (unbeknownst to me) someone while tidying up the booth had unplugged and replugged my
QLab computer... Into the NOT battery protected side of the
UPS.
I was about 5 minutes into the show, and everything was fine except for my rebooting
QLab Mac. The show had layered video content and I HAD to start from the start of the show (yes I know how to load to time). Not sure if anyone is familiar with Fringe Festivals, but they typically run on a VERY tight timeline and do NOT allow for much of any
deviation to schedule. I made the executive decision to restart and be damned to being a few minutes off schedule (I knew I could make it up if needed). Thankfully for my own sanity, but not for some others, most of the other venues were affected by the
blackout and their shows were cancelled for the rest of the day. We ended up rescheduling all the rest of my shows to half an hour later to accommodate for people coming from other venues so they could still see shows that day.
3) I was co-TD and one of the designers for a small semi-pro summer
theatre festival that ran for two summers. We had a few show cancellations due to the fact that in season 2 we had the majority of our shows outdoors in the courtyard of a historic Gaol (Jail), the same Jail that one of the plays actual events occurred in. Any light rain we would not cancel, but we cancelled for thunderstorms and high winds. Well one night we were starting to
roll on one show when the forecast changed with a sudden severe thunderstorm advisory, and it was rolling in quick. Now I know to really watch weather like a hawk, long in
advance.
Well this storm noone thought would be anything more than light rain. Until it was about to slam us. Don't remember how far in we were, but we started packing everything up as quickly as we could. We had some lights up on crank towers and the other TD started lowering them as the storm hit proper. Lighting struck the damaged lighting rod on the roof, arc'd across one of the stone walls, hit the tower he was cranking and down to
ground. Blew his cellphone off of his hip apparently, and he was thankfully okay. But jeez that gave us all a scare. Had to change all of the fuses in the
dimmer packs the next day of course. Thankfully I'd already killed the breakers for them.
I obviously have a bunch more (and some good ones) but I gotta go again.