Hair Raising!

Considering that "Beauty & The Beast" is an enourmous show with a big cast, tons of props and costumes and numerous complex scene changes involving two different pieces of a moving stage, very little has actually gone wrong. Last night, however, was doozy.

At the top of Act II, Belle is running through the forest when the wolves set upon her and the Beast arrives to save her. During the wolf fight, one of the wolves accidentally pulled off the Beast's wig, leaving him with just the beast mask and the actor's very, very, short hair. There was nothing they could do but go on with the scene.

So, when Mrs. Potts, Lumiere and I enter, we were a bit stunned since we couldn't see what had occured. My first thought was, "Who's that guy with Belle?".

The Beast was a rock and was determined to continue to play the scene as though nothing was wrong until he had a moment to get offstage to have his hair replaced. Lumiere, on the other hand, could barely keep it together. Everytime I looked into his eyes, I could see that the slightest little thing might just send him into a giggle fit.

This torture dragged on for a good 10 minutes until the Beast, finally, managed to quickly run off stage during a scene and get re-haired. Then, however, I had the unenviable task of singing the lyrics, "Perhaps there's something there that wasn't there before", at which point I though Lumiere was going to explode. And Mrs. Potts had to repeat those lyrics ..... TWICE!!!

We couldn't wait to get off stage and break loose.

The magic of live theatre.

Attack of the snow

OH MY GAWD! The city of London Ontario is under seige....by the elements. When I left for the theatre tonight, around 6 p.m., there was already some serious snowfall underway...traffic down to a crawl, very low visability, that sort of thing. But when I left the theatre a mere 4 hours later I had to clean one foot of snow off my car! A foot of snow in 4 hours.

There were these two ladies parked behind me, who were at the show I'm sure, who begged me for help. They were convinced that they would'nt get their car out onto what is current passing for road because the snow was up past the tires. So, I drove their car out for them and they said (in the best Slavic accent you can muster) "Oh, thanks you. What we would have done without you. God Bless You."

Now, a BIIIG glass of wine