| Posted: 08 February 2009 at 6:06am | IP Logged | 10
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In the interest of fairness (and telling a funny story) I have to admit that the person who screwed up the worst in the actual performance was me. I wrote the damn thing, I had every line memorized (mine and others, I was off book within a week and at times I was prompting others during the rehearsals) but I had problems with the transitions. All of the lines changing the focus were mine and were whimsical (as well as villainous) and had no relation to the previous line in the script (whoever wrote it like that was a twit). So during rehearsal I'd sometimes need prompting but it seemed like I'd gotten it straight in time for the performance. But....
The line I was supposed to say was: "Marvelous, simply marvelous, your human penchant for inane chatter while under stress is truly astonishing. Perhaps I should up the tension!"
The line I actually said was: "Oh this is delicious, I should have done this years ago." Which unfortunately was a jump of about five pages in the script. Instead of correcting me, my fellow actors just went with it as the director and the script watcher tried desperately to get our attention so we could ad lib our way back to the proper place. The director finally decided to stop us and rewind the play (because if we hadn't then about four people who had really worked hard on it wouldn't get their scenes or their songs).
Which we did, and it all seemed to be going alright, but then I saw the repeat line coming: "Oh this is delicious, I should have done this years ago." and I realized I couldn't say that line because if I did we'd get the wrong sort of laughter; laughter at us and not with us. So instead I said; "Oh this is delicious, I should have done this... Ten minutes ago." It brought the house down and strangely enough that seemed to right the ship and get the audience back onside.
Though I felt bad right after I said it because the rest of the cast almost lost it and got the giggles and to me it seemed irresponsible.
The next year when we performed the play again we only had a week of rehearsal so I was given permission to improv as much as I wanted to. Most of the bits worked really well and didn't throw anybody off, but then I was threatening the hero and riffed off something like; "You, your whole crew, your ship, the audience, you all deserve to die!" The audience booed me down and for a moment I was shocked and then I was desperately holding on so as to not laugh. Then I stuck my tongue out at the audience and pounded my fist into my thigh and was able to choke out my next line.
Or also last year I was playing Simon Cowell in an American Idol spoof and at the end I was ranting and raving about how we all sucked and how we should all be cut so as people came on stage I would point at them and say cut in a variety of amusing ways. The actress playing Randy was the mother of the actress playing Paula and she suggested that instead of saying cut to her daughter I instead say cute. That was reasonable and cute, but I couldn't think of a way of saying it that would make it funny. So instead I pocketed my car keys and said; "You're cute, here's the key to my hotel room." And she danced away with them gleefully and it got a really good laugh. The only bad thing about that, actually one of two bad things, first I had to tell Danielle about it so she wouldn't hear about it from someone else, and two my fellow judge was a really attractive blonde in an incredibly skimpy cheerleader outfit (made by her mother) and she was only seventeen. Funny, but wrong.
In conclusion; I didn't have a problem with people changing lines if it still made sense and it was funny, but it killed me when a good joke was taken out so a bad joke could be put in place. Though to be fair it was mostly a matter of people with different senses of humor and everyone being nervous because none of us had ever done anything like that before which probably lead people to overthink everything.
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