Actors, singers, dancers, how many times have you told THAT story about the time something went wrong on stage? Or something unexpected and hysterical happened in the middle of your performance?
We wanted to hear about your funniest moments on stage. So last month we ran a competition with the chance to win 3 months FREE StageAgent PRO membership! Why? Because we wanted to share the StageAgent love and find out more about you! We love hearing about what members of our community get up to, on and off stage!
So, the challenge was to tell us your funniest moment onstage, or behind the scenes. And boy, did we get some good stories! It was difficult to choose just 2 winners but, after a lot of thinking, we chose our winning stories.
Our first winner was Ken Lydy, hailing from Ohio. Here is his story!
My wife and I work with a children’s theatre (Kids and Company) in the summer. A couple summers ago we were doing Mulan Jr. We had a very large cast of kids ranging in age from 5 to 18. One of our favorite moments was the show stopping number “I’ll Make a Man Out of You.” My wife and I were watching just off stage on house right. This number had almost all the kids on stage. Towards the end of the song the kids are lined up across the front of the stage ready for the big finish with a large group pose in the center. As the kids moved to the center for a final pose we noticed a glare on the stage…down stage left. Someone spilled water on the stage earlier and now we had a nice sized puddle on stage. My wife quickly went backstage and grabbed an old flannel paint shirt, the first thing she could find. At the scene change she dashed on stage in the dark. The shirt did not soak up the mess, rather it “pushed” it around. She hopped up, and went backstage. It took her longer to return to the audience. When she came back out she informed me that one young girl was so excited to be on stage in her first show…she peed while standing downstage during that song. My wife only discovered this as she tried to clean it up. The girl was not embarrassed. While backstage, my wife got the young girl some new pants and the actor made it back to the stage in time. The show must go on…with or without urine on stage.
Ken Lydy
Our second winner was Donna Sorbello from St. Petersburg, Florida.
Shamokin Dam. A summer stock company. Lady Thiang one week, a Russian peasant the next. On to Panacea week three. Clearly, stock in Shamokin Dam required range, and lots of beer pitchers, I recall. I had quickly changed into lacy, damask and long pearls and donned my weighted wig quickly – -no pins — to play a doomed but aristocratic victim in Unsinkable Molly Brown. Before we went to our soggy ends, there was some joyous dancing in two circles, each twirling in opposite directions. As I came ’round the bend of my circle, and faced the exaggerated, toothy beams of joy on the faces of my fellow future drownees –as only choral folks, eager to please and raise the excitement can beam– all coming round their own bend–as if in slow motion, as each person kicking up their heels, reached me, their broad smiles turned to horror. Everyone’s hands were clasped in a kind of hora style so only their eyebrows and pupils could shoot up as if giving me a warning some loose klieg light was about to fall on my head. Distracted by their sudden attention on moi, I’d only barely focused on a strange feeling creeping about my head. It just seemed like usual perspiration under those battered fake hairs, however, my wig had been inching up slowly. My hands, uselessly, were high in the air clasped, along with everyone else’s. By my second time around, my blond wig was more of a bird’s nest on the top of my long brown hair. Hey, I’m an actor, I could justify it. Those wealthy wives on the Titanic surely wore wigs for those Captain’s dinners, no? And we all know how rough those seas got, and the strong winds that must have caused them. Enough to blow any seafaring society matron’s lid off.
Donna Sorbello
Congratulations Ken Lydy & Donna Sorbello! We hope you enjoy your StageAgent PRO memberships.
