Show Stop Stories

Originally I was going to kind of laundry-list all the times Q-lab had f@#ked over a show that I was on.

But in skimming through the journals... I have over 675 separate incidents logged during around 3,270 performances using the '-lab. (!)

So that seemed like a tedious prospect. Instead I will hijack the thread and talk about a truly lost art: Daily logging.

What? You haven't logged every performance in your career since 1986? I have, and it is pretty interesting sometimes.

To make counting easier, over the years I would do tick marks in the back of each journal to track incidents/recurring events so I didn't have to flip pages.

Like: Q-lab screwed the show, I screwed the show (about one tenth the number of times as Q-lab over my career: 62), Actor missed performance NC/NS (No Call/No Show), Lighting console screwed the show, Musician missed performance NC/NS, Sound console screwed the show, Above the line NC/NS (producer,director,SM,TD,Conductor), Power failure screwed the show, Weather screwed the show, Rigging failure, Scenery failure, Audience riot screwed the show (4 times), Total PA system failure, Rig spot op fell during show (3 times), Sleeping crew screwed/delayed/made interesting the show, Camera failure (4 times), Crew failure, White foam coffee cup left in scene on the best take (16 times!), Crew in scene on best take (3 times), No film in camera on any take (6 times!), Unexpected explosion screwed the show, Pyro landed hot in audience space (8 times!), Feet of film exposed (49,762,304'), Minutes of videotape captured (10,923,234min), On set determination that we'd "Fix it in Post, or FIP" (584 times), Actor/Crew perished during performance (7 times), and my favorite: Naked person randomly appeared during performance. Only four times during my brief experience in the performing arts...

When I die, I suspect that whomever goes through my crap will toss those books into the fire along with Rosebud.

But you should consider doing this. It is cathartic after a tough day to list your enemies and how you would like them to meet their fate and praise the successes which is what actually gets put down the most in the journal...

Thread hijacking (NOT QUITE) complete. Thank you.
[/QUOTE]
@Ancient Engineer
When you annotated:
"Naked person randomly appeared during performance. Only four times during my brief experience in the performing arts... "
Did you not note SEX: Female, Male, Spayed, Neutered, Assimilated or Other? If not, why not??
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard
 
Sadly Ron, I was not involved in the post-appearance interview processes to determine such things with full accuracy.

But from my lofty vantage points I'd speculate strongly that at least three of them were of the "female" persuasion.

Based solely on my limited, personal, experiences and a very sketchy understanding of anatomy...
 
I love this thread. Here's my "show delay" story. It's a bit long, but I've told it many times during training sessions, but I've never written it down. So... for the record:

I was one of the board ops on the Sydney 2000 Olympic opening ceremonies. After four weeks working in a custom-built WYSIWYG lab, we finally got to the stadium and work with the real rig - at night of course. As with most Olympics, the lighting of the flame is a very secretive event - who and how will it be lit. Sydney's flame, conceived by Ric Birch, was very clever because nobody could see the structure of where the flame would be. We rehearsed the lighting 5 times, each at 3:00AM with a no-fly zone enforced by the Australian air force. We're talking TOP SECRET here. It was very exciting. When we first saw the mechanism that was involved, we were amazed. Here's a rundown of how it worked.

winches 2.JPG


At one end of the stadium was a huge stage which seated the orchestra and many of the dignitaries (speeches and welcomes and such). Unbeknownst to the crowd, there was a large 30' diameter pool upstage centre. Behind the stage, build into the stands, looked like an aisle of steps between two sections of seating. Ahhh... but it wasn't. Although it had lights in the steps, the steps themselves were water proofed and during the lighting ceremony became a torrential waterfall ending in the pool.

kino flows.JPG

cauldron.JPG


The next section I'll just copy and paste from here as the significance of the flame's trip and the athletes involved heighten the tension.

The flame was carried by various means of transport across the world to Australia. In Australia the torch followed a circuitous 27,000 km journey around the country visiting many towns and communities. The final lap of Stadium Australia with the torch offered not only the opportunity to for the 110,000 crowd to salute a magnificent medley of six Australian women who had between them won 15 gold medals. There was a "kind of crossing-off process" in solving the identity of the person who would light the Olympic Cauldron. The relay had begun with young indigenous woman Nova Peris, and ended with another in Cathy Freeman. The Freeman culmination, at the end of a ceremony that had emphasized Aboriginal heritage and addressed the issue of reconciliation, amounted to a quietly eloquent statement about the kind of nation Australia aspired to be. It underlined itself boldly as a significant moment in the nation's history.

Freeman ascended four flights of stairs carrying the torch, then walked [seeming walking ON water] across a shallow circular pond to an island in the centre, where she dipped the torch low, then swept it around her to ignite a ring of fire. The pond concealed a submerged cauldron, and the circle of fire consisted of 150 nozzles around the rim of its gas-burner.

InWater.jpg


At this point, the first of three separate machines lifted the huge aluminum flaming and dripping wet cauldron out of the water, encircling Australia's gold medal hopeful.

AboveWater.jpg


What was supposed to happen was the second machine would take this apparently floating monstrosity from above Cathy's head and move it up the water fall. We had lighting cues to go along with this. But it stalled. The machines talked to each other wirelessly and were supposed to verify all the safety latches and locks were working properly before the mechanism "handed the cauldron off" from one machine to the next. Dropping this beast on Australia's gold medal hopeful was clearly not in the best interest of anybody.

The music track ended (Side note, I was sitting beside Tony, the FOH sound guy, and I remember him frantically looking for a CD to put in place as the Fairlight served track ended.) We were at a miss as to run our next lighting cue - the one that 'blew' up the stadium for the fireworks finale. Stage management and the show producers were in the booth behind us. We all stood up and wondered what the hell was going on. It didn't go like this in rehearsals. But then again, TV broadcasters from 45 countries with microwave trucks and wireless cameras and 100,000 cell phones weren't in the stadium at 3:00 in the morning. All that wireless technology falls down a bit and you can't rely on one machine talking to another with all that noise.

The fact of the matter was, mechanically, the machines were working; the safeties were fine. They just could not talk to each other. We were worried about Cathy. One saving grace was she was wearing IEMs so SM told her not to move. She stood there montionless as Peter Tait and Rob Ironside rebooted the control computers. Finally, one of them made that call that the mechanicals were sound and they should just proceed.

I, on the other hand, had another fear. After the flame had traveled around the world, traveled 27,000 km around the country and four times around the stadium, the whole thing was fueled by a small propane tank embedded in this floating cauldron that is now somewhere between machine #1 and machine #2 on the way to machine #3 - it's final resting point on a 100' tall mask at the one end of the stadium. If it didn't continue on its journey post-haste, it would soon snuff itself.

Handoff.jpg


Eventually it started the painfully slow crawl towards the top of the stadium and made the hand-off to machine #3 which raised it up on a mask which had a huge LPG supply from the city.

burner control.JPG


Resting.JPEG


Another quote: Despite the temporary glitch, the television footage of Cathy Freeman lighting the cauldron was declared "the sporting image of the year" by Sportel, a major international sports television convention held annually in Monaco, which awarded its coveted "Golden Podium" award to the Sydney Olympic Broadcasting Organisation for the cauldron lighting sequence.

And this is my lesson on when and where you can trust wireless technology.
 

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Man, I have a Hog II in my living room... (it's not doing anything but accepting dust...)

What a great story and lesson about wireless in critical situations...
 
Like: Q-lab screwed the show, I screwed the show (about one tenth the number of times as Q-lab over my career: 62), Actor missed performance NC/NS (No Call/No Show), Lighting console screwed the show, Musician missed performance NC/NS, Sound console screwed the show, Above the line NC/NS (producer,director,SM,TD,Conductor), Power failure screwed the show, Weather screwed the show, Rigging failure, Scenery failure, Audience riot screwed the show (4 times), Total PA system failure, Rig spot op fell during show (3 times), Sleeping crew screwed/delayed/made interesting the show, Camera failure (4 times), Crew failure, White foam coffee cup left in scene on the best take (16 times!), Crew in scene on best take (3 times), No film in camera on any take (6 times!), Unexpected explosion screwed the show, Pyro landed hot in audience space (8 times!), Feet of film exposed (49,762,304'), Minutes of videotape captured (10,923,234min), On set determination that we'd "Fix it in Post, or FIP" (584 times), Actor/Crew perished during performance (7 times), and my favorite: Naked person randomly appeared during performance. Only four times during my brief experience in the performing arts...

This made my day. I can't decide whether the reasons made it for me, or the number of times associated with each reason. Now I wish I could go back and start this...
 
And this is my lesson on when and where you can trust wireless technology.

With all due respect to the relevant vendors here, that goes in inverse logarithmic proportion to the cost of the staging and the number of eyeballs watching. I not only wouldn't have done this one wirelessly, I would have had *three* *diversely routed* wired connections.

The cost isn't even epsilon; what was the budget for *just* that torch presentation; 7 figures?
 
I've searched around a bit and didn't find a thread of stories of stopping shows, so I'm now creating one. Since I'm suggesting this, I might as well put my story here and let the rest of the community share their stories.

We were showing Suessical the Musical spring 2017. Since it was a school show, we skipped intermission and such to keep the running time shorter. What had happened was a student had a seizure the scene after "intermission" (a blackout extended by 30 seconds where we still had house lights come up dimly so school staff could monitor the high schoolers). One of the spot ops called it out over the headset when he saw some teachers moving towards a student laying on the ground. This lead to an immediate show stop, worklights and house lights going to full and curtain closing, all mics were muted, and a short announcement stating the the show was on hold for some time. EMS showed up a couple minutes later and took the student to the hospital. We then skipped some slow songs due to loss in time and finished the show on time.

What's your guys' stories of show stops?

I might possibly have the best one. How about "The audience stands up and stops the show due to technical failure"?

It's 1979. "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" starring Alexis Smith. Second stop on the National Tour at the Miami Beach Theatre for the Performing Arts. Yours truly is the sound designer.

Ten minutes into the first act, the first 20 rows of blue-haired ladies stands up en masse and shouts " WE CAN'T HEAR YOU!".

Alexis Smith breaks character, walks down to the footlights, and asks "What seems to be the problem?"

The problem, as later discovered, was a 1/4" standard phone plug connected to a ring-tip-sleeve patch bay on the house sound system. It backed out slightly, and Voila!---no console feed to the house system.

That was the moment I went back to lighting. I often reminisce with Abe Jacob (who gave me the job) about this story. He agrees that my move back to lighting was probably best for all concerned. ;)

ST
 
The cost isn't even epsilon; what was the budget for *just* that torch presentation; 7 figures?
The rough number I was told was it was A$10M. Now the Auzie dollar was in the toilet at the time of the show, but none-the-less, it was expensive. We all asked during rehearsals (specifically about the order of our cue stack) "What if it doesn't work?". The answer was always: "It has to work; it's a $10,000,000 gag!". To be fair, 20 years ago anything digital over wireless was pretty new. We all know a lot more about it now. If anybody knows anybody at Tierney and Partners, I'd like to get more details of what actually happened. I was getting my information over coms, and it was a LONG time ago.
 
My show stop is nowhere near as dramatic. It was a Windows 10 machine (you're way ahead of me here, aren't you) which had been configured to apply its updates at 10:30 am when needed. This machine wasn't even connected to the internet at the time, but had been some days previously, and evidently had an update in its locker. 30 minutes into the show, the update started of its own accord, and we were a victim of the (then) common problem of updates resetting the preferred time to apply subsequent updates to the default, which happened to be 8:30 pm local time. The PC was running SCS, so had all our sound effects for the show. The show being Ladies in Lavender, which relied pretty heavily on its effects. Needless to say, to add extra spice to the mix, the update didn't apply cleanly and instead of a 5 minute interruption, which would have been manageable, the machine wouldn't restart. Being a volunteer run amateur theatre, we didn't have the "luxury" of parallel redundant systems, so that was that show cancelled.

The iMac and QLab arrived that month.
 
I can't compete with the Olympics, but the most terrifying show stop I've ever been a part of made the NYTimes...for those that get pay-walled, Julius Caesar at Shakespeare in the Park, Central Park, in 2017, protestors stormed the stage. Truly one of the worst/most terrifying experiences of my professional life. This was the one that got the most press, and maybe the only full show stop of the run (the rest I think were just "pauses"). Due to insane press, and a radio host in the midwest offering a bounty for anyone who could fully halt the show the venue was being protected by a few dozen NYPD. We had a few hecklers every night, and if they broached plaster they got tackled by the NYPD but eventually there was a rhythm to it and the actors would just pause a little, wait for the police to get off the stage, and continue with the show.

For show stops that were moderately my fault - A one-nighter tour stop in my early touring career in a random city. Did my pre-show checkout, house opens, and I go do whatever I do when the house is being sat. Show starts with the show's main rag in, and on the first beat it flies out. I see it go up a little, then it grounds. I see it go up a little more, then it grounds. Then I see it go about 10' up, I hear a crash, I hear some insane noises come out of my FOH racks, battery backups kick on, and full-scale noise comes out of the PA. The producer on this tour sent me out without an A2 so I bolted backstage, see my PD on its side, and I hard-cut the power.

Long story short, the Props department in this city had a new member and they had been instructed to mop the stage. After checkout we'd fly the main rag in and we'd mop the show deck once the crew had stopped walking over it. They took their job VERY literally and what I didn't know what that after checkout they had moved all of the amp racks and my PD in order to mop under them, and they had never slid the PD back into place and some of the connectors had gotten caught in the pipe as it flew out. I don't remember how long we held for, at least 20 minutes because that particular audio console had a 10 minute boot time, but I somehow had enough spare cable to get the show back up and running. Anyhow, now I make a habit of walking by Ampland at places call just to make sure everything is in the same spot, even if I have a rockstar A2.

I've had a few other notable show stops, nothing that made the press though. I did a large musical a few years back that had a few dozen insane strobe lights scattered through the set (I'm no LX person but these strobes were more intense than anything I've ever seen), despite intense seizure warnings in the lobby we'd induce a seizure about once a month. The first one caused a full on show stop until management developed a seizure protocol. I did a musical a few years back in a foreign country and the city we were in came under rocket attack during Act 1 and we briefly considered holding as air raid sirens went off in the venue and on all of our phones but the local promoter was very adamant that it was "routine" and we shouldn't pause. The promoter told all of the actors that it was a fire alarm, the crew all had phones so we saw the alerts coming in, and once the actors found out they had been deceived there was a lot of drama at intermission - but a show-stop close call doesn't count for this threads purposes!
 
My most memorable near-stop was during Grease. Our TD / carp forgot to cover the smoke heads in our studio and was prepping that space. They tripped the alarm and we evacuated. After 20-odd minutes of milling about outside, we got the all-clear and the best hashtag: #greasefire
 

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