Sitting in a hotel room in Macau SAR, China reading maybe the craziest performance report I’ve ever received:
“About five minutes after we opened the house, a tornado warning went into effect and the audience and Dog Days team were evacuated to the green room and sub-basement. Then, during our brief tenure in the basement, our theater was struck by lightning, and we lost power. Once the tornado warning passed, the audience was escorted back into the theater (with emergency lighting); we regained some power to the building at that point, although not enough to power the show.
We decided to give the preshow lecture while waiting for news or for the power to come on. Beth Morrison moderated a discussion with Royce Vavrek, David T. Little and Robert Woodruff. At 7:50pm, we made the call to cancel the performance and instead present a few numbers of the opera acoustically. Since we did not have conductor monitors, the cast sat at chairs mid-stage with eye line to Alan. It was stunningly beautiful to hear the piece in such a raw, natural way, and the cast was very brave and generous with their performances.
We made it a little over 10 minutes into the acoustic concert when a fire alarm went off in the building. (Coincidentally, this happened right as the “curfew siren” was played in Lisa’s aria.) We then had to evacuate the entire audience, cast, crew, creative and production team, this time to the front of the theater. At that point, we called it a night and went to Billy Bob’s. We look forward to our first full performance on Sunday at 2pm.”
Thanks to Lindsey Turtletaub for that!
In any case, lightning did not strike twice and the next show went off fine. And hey look a nice review that featured the design:
Dog Days in Texas
“Sets and video by Jim Findlay are disturbingly evocative, with a constant barrage of special effects including drones-eye and surveillance camera views—and equally frightening, a doomed adolescent girl’s desperate view of herself in a mirror. A backdrop screen presents a shaded bucolic scene including a church steeple, which the viewer make of what he or she will. ” –Wayne Lee Gay, D Magazine