Our new Broadway season opens in two weeks with the side-splitting comedy The Play That Goes Wrong. To celebrate, we found this collection of Broadway and musical theater blooper reels.
Crying.
We were crying by the time we picked out this video mash-up of Broadway mishaps for your viewing pleasure for the Straz Center blog this week. As you know, our Bank of America Broadway at The Straz season launches Oct. 16 when The Play That Goes Wrong opens in Morsani Hall. As you may not know, The Play That Goes Wrong is about a show that goes completely off the rails … well, it never starts on the rails; the wheels fall off before the curtain rises. Trust us—the show is howlingly funny in that it’s nonstop physical humor that indulges in gag-after-gag of the greatest actor’s nightmare: forgotten lines, breaking props. Oh, and a lead who’s been accidentally knocked unconscious.
A scene, a show, a line—these things can go sideways in live theater. Perhaps you’ve been in the audience when Dracula, grappling with townsfolk, accidentally rolled too far and tumbled over the proscenium into the orchestra pit (we saw this once). Or maybe you were there that fateful night in 2005 when a 97-pound Kristin Chenoweth didn’t know she was supposed to take only a half-Vicodin for her injured vertebrae, took a whole one, and arrived as Glinda in Wicked feeling like a reeeeeeeeeeeeally good witch. Too bad her tongue and face muscles weren’t cooperating with her brain although she notes that some fans regard that show as her best.
Things happen. People fall down. Props break or don’t get put on stage at all. Wardrobes malfunction. People fall down. Actors “go up;” i.e. blank on their lines. People fall down. Sometimes actors miss cues and don’t arrive onstage—at all. What’s left to do when the horrifying prospect of something going wrong becomes reality? Well, laugh. And, honestly, why is people falling so funny? Why?
Here’s a short video of productions from Broadway to middle school that captures the precisely hilarious moments when the plays go wrong.
Not theater but still funny: Sometimes You Sneeze into Your Trombone
