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You and you and nothing but you.

Posted on February 3rd, 2012 by Travis Bedard

Well I hope you’ve been reading along as we’ve been introducing the cast of our upcoming Messenger No. 4 (Or…. How to Survive a Greek Tragedy). If you haven’t been following along you really should check it out, they’re delightful.

I’ve been asking them about their favorite and least favorite moments on stage because at its heart Messenger No. 4 is about the lengths we go to to create the former and erase the latter (both on stage and in life). Whether those erasable forgettable moments happen because it’s truly bad play or because of cosmic confluence – they never quite leave us… nor do those good moments… whether transcendent performance moments or crises managed with casts you adore.

I want to hear your war stories.

What was your favorite moment on stage?
What moment do you wish you could simply erase forever?

Drop them in the comments here or write a post of your own and link it in the comments below.

and here, a portrait of the artist as a young man as an old man.

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Tags: Messenger No. 4, Meta // 6 Comments »

  • Bries Vannon

    There are a lot of moments on stage I hold near and dear to me, but for sheer fun, it’s hard to beat playing a young Charlie Watts in Ronan Marra’s AFTERMATH. Having a chance to play live renditions of Paint It, Black, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Sympathy For The Devil, and Satisfaction while a rabid sold-out audience claps and cheers and sings along? Unimaginable.

    My worst? I played Grandpa in YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU in high school and every time we got to the titular line in rehearsals, we couldn’t get through without commenting on it somehow (hey, we were in high school). But I’ll be damned if the director didn’t actually incorporate it into the show. Yes, a full-on suspension of disbelief killing mug to the audience on the line, “You can’t take it with you.” It was hilarious. Until opening night when I realized we actually had to do it to real people. And the real people, naturally, didn’t find it anywhere near as funny as we had in rehearsal. Deeeeeeathly silence. Learned a hard and fast lesson about killing your darlings with that one.

  • http://blog.CambiareProductions.com Travis Bedard

    I haven’t played Dipinna yet… but it’ll happen…

  • Petricat666- Diane Wilshere

    My favorite was when I went on as Golde in Fiddler leaning the role in 8 hours & halfway thru
    Act 1 realized I had the best seat to enjoy the hilarious dream scene
    My worst- the anthropological version of Dark of the Moon. That’s all I’ll say

  • http://blog.CambiareProductions.com Travis Bedard

    Oh Diane that’s just awesome. Did you just perform Golde that one night or did you take over the run?
    Thanks for stoping by!

  • http://twitter.com/SMLois Lois Dawson

    Favourite moment on stage: Opening night of Hamlet at Project X (an outdoor theatre company in Kamloops, BC) when we were hit with a massive thunderstorm.  Just before the first sword fight in our staging myself, the director and SM ran out onto stage with mops and towels and dried the whole stage off so the actors could safely proceed. We got our own round of applause and we got to have safety!

    Moment I wish to erase from memory: First year acting class, final monologue presentation. All but two of us had been able to go on the day before.  This day there’s only me and one other person.  Turns out we had the same monologue and she was a scholarship student.  Me following her to do the exact same piece was PAINFUL.

  • http://analog-nation.com/ Chris Keating

    My favorite moment was actually something that happened twice in college productions, once during The Matchmaker and once during The Rivals. Each time, there was one moment during the run when I lost track of myself, was fully focused on the other character, and unexpectedly got a giant laugh.

    These were moments that didn’t usually get laughs, moments I had not even pegged as being all that funny. They remind me to this day that in a stage play you absolutely cannot under any circumstances play the joke, it HAS to come from a place of honesty and it has to have a goal.

    There’s been exactly one time in my life that I had a line I knew would kill every night, and it’s because I had that lesson from college.

    As for the moment I have tried many times to forget, well … I was in a touring children’s theater troupe, in which we sang a song that improvised rhymes for the names of kids in the audience. (It’s better than it sounds.) This one girl’s name was Briana, and I rhymed it with the line, “Can someone else rhyme this name? I don’t wanna.”

    Which, in my defense, TOTALLY RHYMES.

    However, snarkified genius that I am, I did not SING the line, deciding instead to play it straight … which, of course, made it sound like I was serious. A veteran cast-mate looked as though he were about to murder me with the power of his mind.

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