How to recover from a bad show

by Courtney Talbott, Guest Editorial

I spent the opening night of my recent show sitting at the back of the auditorium, poised to run backstage and fix problems. It didn’t start out that way. I gave a curtain speech and felt the excited buzz of anticipation as I sat and watched the show begin.

And then… the mics didn’t work, the curtains caught three times, a trumpet was left onstage, and two actors who had never had so much as a slip of the tongue in rehearsal froze and forgot their lines. Props weren’t checked or went missing after being checked.

But that’s what makes theater so special. It is a living, breathing organism. Expecting perfection, or even the same show from one night to the next, is setting yourself up for failure. Still, it’s difficult to see what you spent the past few months of your life crumbling before you.

So, how do we recover from a bad show? How do we find the fortitude to face the following evening with a smile instead of a grimace?

Expect the unexpected. Props will be left onstage. Actors will go up. Set pieces will tip over. It will be a rocky ride if you go in expecting nothing to go wrong. Remember that what we do is so much bigger than one show. Even if everything is metaphorically on fire, your kids are looking to you for how to react. If you fall apart or get angry, they will internalize it. They will take the blame on themselves. They may feel like the theater isn’t where they belong, which would be a great loss and untrue.

Amidst all the chaos, something wonderful happened. When things were no longer in my hands, the kids took over. Someone casually removed the trumpet during the next scene. The students came around the stuck curtains and continued acting. Scene partners jumped in and redirected the lines without whispering the cues under their breath.

So in between running backstage and worrying about what would happen next, I laughed. I laughed so hard at one point that I had to bite my lip to avoid making noise. Sometimes, it’s all you can do. If I choose to laugh or cry, I laugh every time.

After the bows, I talked to my students for the next 24 hours until our next show. I told them how proud I was of them. I praised them for doing everything I had taught them, even when they were nervous and it would have been easy to forget. I told them that the next show would be a piece of cake if they could handle that. And you know what? It was.

The following evening was flawless, and the kids were shining up there. No one could have been more pleased than I was, and the students learned valuable lessons they will use going forward.

Besides, it makes for a great story!