Falling Towers

Our audiences in Hefei had been unexpectedly vociferous, cheering at the curtain’s first rise, laughing at all the right jokes (and even the wrong ones), just generally “getting” it…like a normal, excuse me…like a North American audience would. They made us want to give them what they came for, give them all we had, and so it seemed such a shame to stop the show fifteen minutes before the curtain yesterday. Such a shame indeed. But we had no choice in the matter.

During a flurry of a scene change, as the curtain was coming down, the music was swelling, the girls were running off for a quick change, and a handful of crew members were furiously pushing two gigantic Pullman cars into the wings, something went horribly wrong. One of the Pullman cars ran off track and rammed directly into a twenty-foot tall lighting tower in the wing off stage and, as in a slow motion movie scene and almost in dispute with the laws of gravity, the tower toppled over, barely missing the groups of actors and stagehands mere feet away. It did have one victim, however. A toe. A little toe to be exact, belonging to one Adam Blood, one of our carpenter/stagehands.

Everything stopped, the curtain came down, stagehands and crew members came running, we got ice, some woman made a speech in Chinese, we don’t know what she said (of course), half-naked chorus girls stood around while “valiant” straight chorus boys (wait, there’s only one) tried to ‘help.’ The light tower got pushed back into place, cues and lighting spots were checked, we stopped shaking, Adam ripped off his toenail so he could continue the rest of the show backstage, and the show went on to receive some uproarious applause at final curtain.

It’s really not just a saying. The show must go on.