The Show Must Go On... Usually

So, I was going to write about our opening night and the glory that was our accomplishing that first night of stellar performance, but now I'm going to write about the surreal events of this evening instead.

Last night, Thursday, was fabulous. There were the expected massive blunders. Massive. Blunders. But there was also the anticipated genius. The training held strong, and the actors worked wonders. The techies, myself included if I may say so, manuevered their way through a minefield of potential disasters without any perceptable hitch. A thrilling and stupendous night. And lots of notes for improving the next shows.

Tonight, Friday, started off fine. It felt a touch slow in terms of energy (mostly just second-night syndrome, a common occurrence in live theater) but it went more technically smoothly than the last show. The audience was slow to warm up, but warm up they did, and well. Everyone had both some slight errors and some excellent moments and/or interactions as well.

Then we had our intermission.

This show has been a series of firsts. One of them was having an intermission at all. Another was having to cancel a performance.

Yes, that's right. During intermission tonight, our lead actress, and fabulous web designer, became incredibly ill. Nausea and severe dizziness, not to mention fever and an inability to stand for risk of fainting, prevented her from continuing the show, although she had already valiantly survived the first act. She had not realized how sick she was, and certainly none of the rest of us had either. After stretching intermission out to nearly 30 minutes in an effort to get her standing and semi-functional again, I decided that this was not going to work as she was obviously about to fall over when we finally got her to her feet; she had to sit again immediately and couldn't stand without support. I went to the audience, told them we were all fine but that one of our actors was very sick and that we were cancelling the rest of the evening. I also told them, on a moment of sudden inspiration, that they could come back tomorrow for free if they wanted to. I hope some of them do, we got two pages-worth of names of people who might return. In the mean-time, I eventually got Emma home to her mother and to bed.

So now we wait through the night. We assume that Emma will be up and going tomorrow, but we leave open the possibility of cancelling the matinee. I'll check in with her and then talk to the other actors also. We suspect she got hit hard with a stomach flu since one of our stage managers left during intermission with one yesterday and now i'm getting nauseous and headachey as well. Let's hope no one else gets sick and that the shows will indeed go on! "Let's give three cheers and one cheer more for the good person of Szechwan!"