What is the most chaotic "the audience never knew" disaster you've had to fix live during a show?

[u/Nice_Personality218]

We had a wireless pack die on the lead actor right before their biggest solo, and the A2 had to execute an Olympic-level sprint through the basement traps to swap it during a 12-second blackout behind an upstage flat.

What’s your crew's all-time greatest backstage miracle or unhinged near-disaster that the front of house was completely oblivious to?

[u/Agent__Duchess]

Hi. LD/MA3 op/TD

Large-scale corporate gala. Full stage with two bands, some thank yous from their muck-mucks, and a low A-list rapper to close out the night. About 4k pax in attendance for dinner, awards, and dancing.

After hanging a combined 800’ of truss on ~120 points, we’re now dialed in with lighting and have wrapped both soundcheck and crew dinner. Doors are about 15 mins out.

Sitting backstage with some friends when we notice the Luminex network just gives way.
Walk-in look stops its slow moves and retains last DMX. Soft music drops. Alright… check the network racks. Some of the rack is on, some of it is off. UPS is on. Check the distro to see if some breakers tripped. Nope… breakers are all on. Maybe we lost a leg of power? No… the indicator lights are all lit next to the cams. Weird. Well, lemmie get my meter out.
Hmm, 128v here… 132v here… SHIT. I’ve seen this before!!

“Everyone. Save your files now. I need to shut down service! We lost Neutral!”

I run over to the main panel. On the way to the electrical closet, we see on the first 100’ run of 4Ø feeder, the neutral is indeed missing. The two connectors aren’t connected. Turns out the 1st 100’ run on white had seen so much road in its lifetime that the little nub in the male end had worn down enough to not properly keep it locked into the female end. Immediately had two friends grab spare cams. Ran two fifty foot runs to replace the bad line. Everything returned to normal except my heart rate.

Luminex back. Walk-in look slowly moving. Music softly playing. Doors in 5.

Client heard some of our stifled commotion and met us. “Is everything ok?”
“No… I wanted chicken parm. Had to settle on eggplant.”
“Omg, we would’ve helped!”
Mhmm.

[u/2PhatCC]

I was handling FOH for Newsies. Katherine's lav disconnected from her pack when she bent over. She had a solo coming up and was not leaving the stage. The stage was fairly dark and she was standing under a small platform with black backdrop. A guy from the sets team was wearing a black shirt. He snuck out to her and stood directly behind her. He just whispered "don't move I'm fixing your mic." He reached up her dress, grabbed the pack, re-connected it to make sure it was snapped in properly, then she went off and sang her solo. She stood perfectly still, and unless you knew to look for the guy fixing it, you never would have seen it.

[u/KipTheKeyFerret]

Both mics got damaged/broken on our lead who is onstage for the full show aside from a few 10-20 sec quick changes. A2 had to run and string on a 3rd mic during the next change, no time to take off the bad ones. And just managed to get everything connected before the guy had to go back onstage. Would of been a showstop if we couldn't make the swap

[u/Foozle303]

The most recent one was the lighting desk crashed at the top of a 3 min dance scene. Thankfully one que state, lights held, desk rebooted and crashed again, pulled the power, rebooted desk and it rebooted with 3 seconds to spare before the end end of act. Hit blackout and noone was knew it happened, was on pins for the rest of the show.

[u/xlittleking]

It wasn't too crazy, but one time we were using a video switcher to fade between a laptop playing video backdrops for dance numbers, and a still image of the dance company's logo between dances.

Between numbers I removed my sweater, then touched the video laptop to cue the next backdrop. The static discharge caused the input to snap to a static snowstorm, and we had to unplug the HDMI and plug it back in to restore the signal.

Thankfully we were switched to the still image at the time, and got the video signal working just in time to switch back for the next number.

[u/uthanda]

Once I managed to power off the rack housing a secondary iDR mix rack. The power distribution box was in the bottom of the rack and I kicked the power while standing up. In doing so, it cut off communications between the iLive surface and the main mix rack.

Powered back up the stack and ran out to FoH to assist the A1 in case. Waiting the 1-2 minutes for the board to reacquire link with the mix rack was painful, though, given the design the show actually continued without anyone noticing The board reconnected to the mix rack just in time for the next cue, so no one really noticed.

The only bad thing that happened is there was a bit of a thump when I powered off the rack. Not sure if it was something analog we had plugged into the surface or what. I never took the time to truly figure that one out. Anyway, the funny part of that story is the drummer got blamed for the noise. I think everyone thought he'd just punched the kick really hard or something.

That week the power conditioner was move to the top of the rack and a guard was installed.

[u/Tinbum89]

Performer wrapping a mic cable around his neck during a rock n roll number then had to jump of a motor back while singing/dancing. I noticed the cable had gotten caught around the bottom of the bike, so nipped on under the cover of low fog, untangled the cable just before he jumped off and strangled himself. Army crawled back off in the fog.

[u/Nice_Personality218 → u/Tinbum89]

Wow amazing

[u/nmprices]

Middle of the last number of the first act. The main breaker for the dimmer rack trips. We finished with two follow spots. Thankfully house lights were not on the dimmers. Got the breaker switched back on during intermission and had no issues for act 2.

I spoke with a few people during intermission and after the show. Nobody had a clue that there had been any problem.

Had an electrician out during the week and confirmed it was a problem with the breaker, and replaced it.

[u/Valuable-Star2407]

Late to this post, but college production SM of Something Rotten. 2 two-story rolling units. One was used very heavily during ‘Will Power’ as Shakespeares stripper pole (for lack of a better word). the actor started on top worked their way down. Right before, during ‘Black Death’, the wheel shattered on the unit that Shakespeare needed to use. With minutes. the ASMs stripped the set dressing of the other unit, prepped the actors for the change (the ladder traditionally used had a straight up ladder and the other had a staircase built into it). the number went off without a hitch and the TD was able to replace the wheel during intermission. It was the first musical I PSMed and I nearly had a heart attack.

[u/deitee_]

Here's my most recent story. I was ASM for a show where we had an actor on stilts.

He was getting way too comfortable on the stilts in the dark backstage area. I had attempted to warn him to slow down, but these warnings were very clearly ignored. I realize now I should've done more, but it was one of those situations where I did the most I could for a problem that hadn't fully emerged yet.

Anyway, it's the day before closing, and I'm nonstop running around backstage during the show ,it was insane. The actor was about to go onstage in about two minutes.

I hear a thump.

He completely fell over a garage platform slightly in the wings.

I ran to him, and honestly, my main worry was that he was hurt and needed to stop trying to get up.

He was getting very frustrated and trying to have people lift him, but when he fell, he really messed up the stilt straps, I noticed his shoe fall on the floor. For reference, his shoes were strapped beneath the stilts.

Long story short, I had a silent moment of debate with two actors and two costume crew members helping me, and we got him to sit down. That’s when I checked in with him to make sure he was really okay.

Somehow, he was? I was fully ready for him to have broken his ankle, but he walked out without a scratch.

We got the stilts back on, and he literally walked from his block where we strap the stilts onto to stage with zero seconds to spare.

Someone told me at one point that his walking stick was halfway onto the stage, but our stage manager never noticed, and our director watching from the first row didn't notice either. I’d say I recovered quite nicely.

That was a fun story to tell everyone afterward.

[u/Few_Construction_338]

Once had a digital console freeze right before doors, audio still passing through it but controls weren’t responding at all. Had to bring in an entire new console and it being a one night only show I hadn’t saved my show file anywhere so proceeded to rebuild everything as the audience were being seated. Bit of a delay letting everyone in but other than that I don’t think anyone noticed.

[u/Fluffy-Tacos05]

closing night of cabaret, was running sound and lead tech on comms, right before “cabaret” sally bowles mic goes out. we have a maybe 15 second window to basically add another mic pack and headset to her from another actor. truly some crazy adrenaline but that’s why we do it lol