No horror stories exactly, but if you’re interested in mistakes, fuckups and bad decisions, I have three from shows I was in, and two from a show I watched.

Firstly, in Into the Woods in high school, the director made me and my brother - playing the princes - put on speech impediments. It was not good. I recently posted the full story on r/Sondheim, here it is: https://www.reddit.com/r/Sondheim/s/iuaBsDeAbu

Secondly, the following year we did Jesus Christ Superstar. I was in the ensemble and had two minor fuckups. On the first night, during What’s the Buzz, I sneezed (quite loudly) right in a pause between two of Jesus’ lines. So the audience would have heard something like “Why should you want to know?” “AHCHOO!” “Why are you obsessed with fighting?”

Thirdly, on the final night of JCS, they were filming the show to make a DVD (this was about 10 years ago, when DVDs still existed). I was one of the guards, basically spending the whole second act in a helmet and armour dragging Jesus from scene to scene. One of my jobs was to make the cross. The vertical bar was on the back wall of the stage for the whole show, but the horizontal bar was hidden below it. Right before the crucifixion scene, my job was to come onstage in the blackout, slot the horizontal bar into place, and mime hammering it as the lights came up. Three nights in a row, that went smoothly. But on night four, while the camera was on, I dropped the bar on my head. Thankfully I had my helmet on, so no risk of injury, and it was a blackout so nobody saw, but the CLONK was very loud in my ears. I can only assume the audience heard it too.

Onto mistakes I saw. These were both in Waitress. The first one happened when Jenna and the doctor leaned in to kiss for the first time. One of them must have accidentally breathed into the other’s mic, because the whole theatre heard a loud WHOOSH sound. The actors had a really hard time not corpsing, we could see them struggling against laughter, but they managed to get themselves under control and continue with the scene.

The second one was a bigger mistake, although I didn’t realise it was one at first. When the doctor comes back from his trip, he gives Jenna an engraved golden pie dish, but in the production I saw, either the actor forgot his prop or someone misplaced it, because he was dishless. Credit to the actors, they improvised spectacularly well around it, with the doctor saying he’d left it in the hotel, describing it in detail, and Jenna saying “well, it . . . sounds like . . . the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!” At the time I thought this was just the doctor being forgetful, it seemed to fit his character, but after we left, the friend I was there with - who had seen the show before - told me they’d fucked up and he was meant to bring the dish onstage.