Most Disastrous Performances?- Page 3
Most Disastrous Performances?
#50Most Disastrous Performances?
Posted: 6/27/11 at 12:44amThe funny thing is that when I went to youtube to search for it, I typed, "Peter Pan set fail" into the box, and not only did the search recognize that phrase, but the video I was looking for was the first one to come up!
LegallyBroadway2
Broadway Star Joined: 8/19/10
#51Most Disastrous Performances?
Posted: 6/27/11 at 12:51amI am not one to usually say this, but Chester Gregory was horrible in sister act.
Skip2
Featured Actor Joined: 12/17/04
#52Most Disastrous Performances?
Posted: 6/27/11 at 12:53am
As proof that Elaine Paige's performance in FOLLIES was pretty disastrous:
While singing "I'm Still Here" she flubs the lyrics (a common occurrence), singing "I got through Shirley Temple" too early. She then repeats the same lyrics later and the chorus boys laugh loudly. Maybe they're laughing at the fact that she always flubs SOMETHING in the song?
#53Most Disastrous Performances?
Posted: 6/27/11 at 1:05amI second the Women on The Verge chaos. The show was stopped several times. The cab was pushed around stage by crew while Danny and Sherie did their scenes (awkward). The burning bed didn't go out and Sherie ran away from it mid-scene when it flared up and crew came out with fire extinguishers and the whole theatre smelled like burnt hair. The odd possesed TV rolling around and squeaking. There were just too many flubs to mention.
"The sexual energy between the mother and son really concerns me!"-random woman behind me at Next to Normal
"I want to meet him after and bang him!"-random woman who exposed her breasts at Rock of Ages, referring to James Carpinello
blaxx
Broadway Legend Joined: 6/28/05
#54Most Disastrous Performances?
Posted: 6/27/11 at 1:21amTo me, Sherie Rene Scott getting booed during ReNt. I can't believe she finished her run, must have been awful.
Listen, I don't take my clothes off for anyone, even if it is "artistic". - JANICE
#55Most Disastrous Performances?
Posted: 6/27/11 at 1:28am
^ was that the first preview?! I haven't seen the how onstage, but I have "seen" it somewhere else... I cannot imagine what it would be like for all that to happen at once. That show has so much technology and set pieces going in and out and up and down and sliding to and fro. I can't even imagine what those first previews were like.
When I saw the 25th Anniversary tour of Les Miserables, one of the curtains fell on the side of the scaffolding set pieces that make up the proscenium and slide in and out. The set also clunked and clanked as pieces were awkwardly tracked on and off. I don't know if it wad the venue or what but that set was just loud, slow, and awkward. During Fantine's death I could hear them getting the inn set piece tracked on for the next scene. It was a disaster.
"There’s nothing quite like the power and the passion of Broadway music. "
Nickira Margherita
Swing Joined: 8/12/10
#56Most Disastrous Performances?
Posted: 6/27/11 at 2:22am
The part in Catch Me If You Can where the curtain goes up and the show ends 2 1/2 hours later.
and was Sherie Renee Scott really booed in Rent? I wasn't aware she was in that show, whats the story behind that one?
blaxx
Broadway Legend Joined: 6/28/05
#57Most Disastrous Performances?
Posted: 6/27/11 at 2:31am
and was Sherie Renee Scott really booed in Rent? I wasn't aware she was in that show, whats the story behind that one?
Idina Menzel left the show. The ReNt-heads, who at the time could have given their liver for the love of the OBC, swore it would be Kristen Lee Kelly to take over Maureen. Sherie was cast instead and they might as well have thrown stones at her.
When she asked the audience to "moo' with her, they "BOOED" her -as in, "get the f*** out of that stage now!" It was so embarrassing.
Sherie describes it as one of her worst experiences on the stage.
Listen, I don't take my clothes off for anyone, even if it is "artistic". - JANICE
#58Most Disastrous Performances?
Posted: 6/27/11 at 2:36am
There is a good topic about it here:
https://longisland.broadwayworld.com/board/readmessage.php?page=1&thread=877313&boardid=0
Am glad that she did end up moving to much bigger and better things. She had the last laugh...
"You can't overrate Bernadette Peters. She is such a genius. There's a moment in "Too Many Mornings" and Bernadette doing 'I wore green the last time' - It's a voice that is just already given up - it is so sorrowful. Tragic. You can see from that moment the show is going to be headed into such dark territory and it hinges on this tiny throwaway moment of the voice." - Ben Brantley (2022)
"Bernadette's whole, stunning performance [as Rose in Gypsy] galvanized the actors capable of letting loose with her. Bernadette's Rose did take its rightful place, but too late, and unseen by too many who should have seen it" Arthur Laurents (2009)
"Sondheim's own favorite star performances? [Bernadette] Peters in ''Sunday in the Park,'' Lansbury in ''Sweeney Todd'' and ''obviously, Ethel was thrilling in 'Gypsy.'' Nytimes, 2000
#59Most Disastrous Performances?
Posted: 6/27/11 at 2:52am
Any performance of THE FIRST WIVES CLUB. Seriously.
On that note, I remember a performance of FIRST WIVES where one of the cabinet doors kept popping open during a scene in Barbara Walsh's kitchen. It simply wouldn't stay shut, and at one point Karen Ziemba discreetly leaned over and closed it. Of course, within seconds it popped open again and Ziemba sighed, then resumed her place in the scene. I like to think that little sigh symbolized not just her frustration with the cabinet but with the entire show, so it was a neat little moment of "star, meet flop."
Jay94
Featured Actor Joined: 4/10/11
#60Most Disastrous Performances?
Posted: 6/27/11 at 4:14amI've heard that Liza Minnelli's performance in Victor/Victoria was a disaster in of itself. Did anyone see it? If so could you explain why it was such a disaster?
LegallyBroadway2
Broadway Star Joined: 8/19/10
#61Most Disastrous Performances?
Posted: 6/27/11 at 4:26am
@ABB2357, I found it odd that a kitchen was in Barbara's shower in the first place.
Skip2
Featured Actor Joined: 12/17/04
#62Most Disastrous Performances?
Posted: 6/27/11 at 4:45am
I know the intent of this thread is to remember real disasters (sets falling, people dying, falling into the pit, being dragged into the flys, etc.) But I couldn't help think these performances were pretty disastrous too:
Stockard Channing in THE RINK
Raul Esparza in COMPANY
Raul Esparza in THE NORMAL HEART
Raul Esparza in CABARET
(Loved him in TABOO)
Dorothy Loudon in OVER AND OVER (she even commented on how bad things were in the part while she was performing it)
Carol Burnett in FOLLIES
Mary Martin in LEGENDS
Mary Stuart Masterson in NINE
Deirdre Goodwin in A CHORUS LINE
Kevin Kline in CYRANO DE BERGERAC
Christine Baranski in MAME
Harriet Harris in MAME
Emily Skinner in MAME
Bill Irwin in BYE BYE BIRDIE
Jane Houdyshell in THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST
Alan Cumming in THE THREEPENNY OPERA
Brooke Sunny Moriber in THE WILD PARTY
Kristin Chenoweth in THE APPLE TREE
Audra McDonald in 110 IN THE SHADE
Will Swenson in PRISCILLA
Daniel Evans in SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE
The list goes on and on...
Updated On: 6/27/11 at 04:45 AM
peerrjb
Featured Actor Joined: 7/7/09
#63Most Disastrous Performances?
Posted: 6/27/11 at 5:51am
Second preview of TITANIC in 1997.
Production team had just cut a scene, and had yet to replace it effectively. However, to keep the show "moving", there was simply an announcement "There will be a seven minute delay". Now, at this point in the Second Act, the orchestra was playing the score which WAS completely orchestrated, but frequently, a piano-bass-drum trio would be carrying on (most nobly -- it's a difficult score) through what had NOT been...already a tricky thing. It was a Monday night, and so there were a lotta theatre folks there to support what was rumored to be a troubled show. (The opening number, totally in place and flawlessly performed, got one of the biggest ovations I'd ever heard in a theatre anywhere.) But it had been a very rainy and cold day in town, and so the room seemed to resonate the chill which might have been semi-like the frigid air on the ocean in 1912. The houselights came up to 1/2. (This was not the first time this had happened, albeit in shorter increments.)
Finally, in the balcony where I sat, a woman's voice spoke loudly over the mumbling in the auditorium.
Very Neww Yawk.
"Oh! Now I get it. The SHOW and the SHIP are a metaphor for EACH OTHER."
Silence for a second.
Hellacious laughter.
The show continued.
The "ship" sank.
But to make it worse, this was (as I said) early on, when the final scene wasn't a "scene" at all, but a living "diorama" of the TITANIC on the FLOOR of the OCEAN, over which hovered Robert Ballard's mini-sub which discovered the wreckage.
Silence.
No laughter.
NO APPLAUSE.
When the actors reappeared, the house broke into that wonderful, supportive, "I've been through bits like this", and loving applause which only comes from respect for the work, if not the "work".
A-MAZ-ING evening.
And then, of course, it won the Tony.
wickedfan11
Broadway Star Joined: 6/17/06
#65Most Disastrous Performances?
Posted: 6/27/11 at 6:56amSkip2, I'm sure quite a lot of people here will disagree with you on some of the performances you consider "disastrous".
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
#66Most Disastrous Performances?
Posted: 6/27/11 at 8:05amSkip2's list is disastrous.
Faced with these Loreleis, what man can moralize!
#67Most Disastrous Performances?
Posted: 6/27/11 at 8:07amIt struck me that it was just a list of performances he didn't like.
#68Most Disastrous Performances?
Posted: 6/27/11 at 8:17amMy thoughts exactly.
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
#69Most Disastrous Performances?
Posted: 6/27/11 at 10:14amEsparza was "DISASTROUS" in Company!? Really? no other word to describe him?
#70Death On Stage
Posted: 6/27/11 at 10:37am
The most disastorous show I saw was the premier of a new production of "The Makroupolis Case" at The Metropolitan Opera.
It was the first time the opera had been done at the Met. It should have been the second performance but the first had been cancelled due to a blizzard.
The opera ended prematurely only a few minutes into Act 1 when tenor Richard Versalle, 63, suffered a heart attack while climbing the 20-foot ladder which was part of the set, fell, and died on stage immediately after singing Vitek's line: "Too bad you can only live so long"
It was awful watching him fall, land with a thud and after a moment of stunned silence everything went crazy.
Of course the curtain was closed and the performance cancelled.
#71Death On Stage
Posted: 6/27/11 at 11:25am
To me, Sherie Rene Scott getting booed during ReNt. I can't believe she finished her run, must have been awful.
I never heard about that. I wonder when it happened. She received raves the night I saw her as Maureen.
"What can you expect from a bunch of seitan worshippers?" - Reginald Tresilian
husk_charmer
Broadway Legend Joined: 10/19/06
#72Death On Stage
Posted: 6/27/11 at 11:54am
From what I've heard about Liza in "Victor/Victoria" the first performance she gave (there's a video, with clips on YouTube) she knew her lines, lyrics, blocking, etc. However, the general feeling was "It's nice to see Liza but she isn't right for this at all."
What then happened is largely conjecture. I personally feel like she figured that since they weren't going nuts like she expected, that she decided if she made it look like she was trying to make it work in the role and goof up lines and blocking and seem generally confused, the audience might take pity on her and like her more. It didn't work.
http://www.youtube.com/huskcharmer
carolinaguy
Broadway Star Joined: 10/13/06
#73Bubble burst
Posted: 6/27/11 at 11:57am
I attended a performance of "Wicked" where the bubble got caught in Glinda's wig and dragged her a couple of feet backwards before one of the Ozians rescued her. I'm blanking on who was in the role at the time, but she gave the bubble a devastating look, cleared her throat, and went on. It got a big laugh.
Just remembering you've had an "and"
When you're back to "or"
Makes the "or" mean more than it did before
Updated On: 6/27/11 at 11:57 AM
#74Bubble burst
Posted: 6/27/11 at 12:06pmSherie getting boo'd is so disgusting. Those fans give SUCH a bad name for the broadway community. shame on them. and i agree about chester gregory in sister act.
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