What happens when the show can’t go on?
Written by Executive Director, Burgundy Hill
Every title brings its unique challenges. Problems that we spend weeks solving. And despite accounting for everything within our control, sometimes we still get thrown a curveball the night of a performance. During my tenure so far, I can count these on one hand: A cast or crew member is sick… Unexpected HVAC issues… And even a couple of equipment outages that have caused us to pause a show or reset (most recently during Waitress, where the power flickered due to severe weather and caused our sound to go out during the opening number.) Even in these instances, we can adapt, adjust, and create something magical for our audiences.
But for the first time since I’ve been in this role, I had to make the call to completely cancel a performance, and let me tell you, it is a gut-wrenching decision to have to make. To set our scene, my cell rang at 6:15 ahead of the 7:30 Saturday show for our student lab production of Ghostlight. It was a call from our Box Office Manager, Nicole, and it is never a good sign when I’m getting a call that close to show time. She told me that the power had gone out in the building.
By 7 pm, our audience was starting to show up and still no power. Our generator turns on emergency lights, but we have no way to run stage lighting or sound and no HVAC. Ameren’s information told us that there was an outage in our neighborhood and that estimated restoration time was after 9 pm. We made the decision to wait until 7:30 pm to make the call with how we move forward. As audience arrived, we asked them to wait in the lobby and explained the situation. At 7:30, we were still in the dark.
Unfortunately, with no lights or sound, we had to make the decision to cancel for the evening. And at 7:37, just as I had finished making the announcement and the crowd had started to disperse, the lights came back on. About half our audience was still in the lobby and all looked to see if we were going to go forward. And we had to make the decision again to stick with our original decision.
What was our reasoning? Half our audience had left, our actors were out of costume, and parents were on their way to pick them up. But beyond that, we didn’t know the state of our equipment. Our lighting and sound equipment are not built to be shut off so suddenly. It took us about an hour to power everything back up and troubleshoot a couple issues that came up.
And then the question becomes do we reschedule? Ultimately, because of the circumstances around this show, we decided not to. Again, another heart-wrenching decision. But our schedule made that very difficult, and we could accommodate several members of our audience with the remaining Sunday show.
I am so sorry for our students, who didn’t get to perform their full run and to our audience members who couldn’t join us on Sunday to see the show. We live by the mantra “the show must go on.” It doesn’t feel good when we can’t fulfill that, even when the circumstances are out of our control.
I’m so grateful to the production team, staff, students and parents for their problem solving, flexibility, and understanding as we navigated this decision. While we have policy and procedures for this kind of thing, every situation is unique and we do our best to navigate it in a way honors our volunteers and our audience.
We look forward to welcoming them (and you) back for our next production. With a lot of planning, a little luck, and spark of electricity, we will be here waiting for you.