Tale #3: Olio! Backdrop is stuck on the olio.

One of the shows that I am most proud of was our 2020 production of Mamma Mia. I directed and choreographed it alongside a production team filled with people that I loved working with. We had a phenomenal cast and the show had come together so beautifully. I could not have asked for a better project as my last show with the organization.

Our first two performances had gone great. Standing ovations, dancing in the seats, what more could you ask for?

Our Sunday matinee was very heavily attended. The show had been going amazingly well and people were loving it.

As we headed into Donna’s bedroom for “Our Last Summer” the beach backdrop from “Does Your Mother Know” was supposed to fly out revealing the set rotating into Donna’s room. During this Sunday matinee performance, the beach backdrop got stuck halfway out. So, during the only truly serious moments of Mamma Mia, there was a beach dangling halfway down from the sky. Not only that, Harry, Sophie, and Sam all had to duck under it to enter into the scene as they came into Donna’s room through the elevated door piece. I was mortified. I sat there in absolute disbelief that it was happening. However, the actors handled it beautifully.

As we exited “The Winner Takes It All” and headed into the wedding scene, the stage manager and a crew of actors came out on stage to try to fix it. The drop had gotten got on the Olio pipe and they needed to get the two untangled. It took about five minutes for them to fix it.

The audience was very understanding. However, the pit conductor had taken her headset off so she missed the memo that we were fully stopping the show to fix the backdrop. Therefore, the 30 second scene change music that is supposed to play during that transition, continued to play for the full five-minute break. It felt like a nightmare playing out before my eyes. As the team worked to untangle the drops, one of the pipes knocked over the pitcher of water Donna used in the previous scene. Water spilled everywhere. A group of our teen actors had to run out with our prop beach towels to clean it up. Once the backdrops were successfully untangled and flown out, we still had to watch the cast quickly set all forty-chairs in wedding order before we could resume the show. The music continued to play through all of this.

You know when things go so wrong that sometimes you just start to laugh. That is where I had gotten at this point. Sitting at the back of a packed theater, I could not stop laughing. The sight of twelve people trying to fix a backdrop, knocking over a pitcher of water in the process, combined with the ever so repetitive scene change music felt like a scene straight out of a sitcom.

Performance mishaps can be incredibly stressful to deal with in the moment, but incredibly funny to reminisce about later. As soon as that matinee performance ended, we rehung the drops on different pipes so that we would never have to relive that awful experience again.