All the wrong moves Production mishaps part of the fun in award-winning comedy By: Ben Waldman Posted: 4:13 PM CDT Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024

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This article was published 16/10/2024 (540 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Honey Pham was 12 years old when she got her first shot at acting, and when she first noticed the shot glasses at intermission — a tradition that coincided with the rush of a high school production’s closing night.

Pham’s Winnipeg school didn’t have a princely production budget, so rather than mounting separate affairs for both middle and high school classes, it chose to hybridize, smushing together the coming-of-age stars with the soon-to-be graduates singing their tipsy swan song.

“I remember thinking, ‘That’s probably not a good idea,’” recalls Pham — now 24 and about to star in The Play That Goes Wrong at Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre — about the underage backstage swigs.

“And then I watched one of the princes starting to mumble, starting to slur his words a little bit, and he meanders across the stage, trips, falls off and takes down about half the set with him as he goes down. I just remember looking at the aftermath — at the audience, parents watching.

“But the actors kept going, I couldn’t believe it. They finished the play, and no one said anything. Our drama teacher was so serious. ‘I’ve never seen anyone so bad (onstage).’ That was probably like the worst of the things that have gone wrong, and that was the first show I ever did.”

Pham’s reason for sharing isn’t schadenfreude, but related to her featured role as Annie in RMTC’s season-opening production of the Olivier- and Tony-winning comedy of errors big and small directed by Dennis Garnhum.

Pham’s role in the production, co-backed by the Citadel Theatre and Theatre Calgary, is her first at RMTC. One of three Winnipeg actors in the multi-city production, Pham is joined by Emily Meadows (RMTC’s Into the Woods) and Ray Strachan (MLK Jr. in RMTC’s The Mountaintop).

Strachan’s own story of offstage hijinks affecting onstage business is rated G, a tile worth two points in the Winnipeg actor’s former halftime pastime.

“I don’t know what it is about me and Scrabble, but that’s why I probably don’t play Scrabble backstage no more,” says the actor, who plays a lighting operator and stagehand named Trevor.

“Please don’t bring that board around me. It’s just too distracting. I get into it too much, a little too competitive. I’ve missed my cue because of Scrabble. You just hear these foot stomps — clump, clump, clump — backstage before we’re supposed to push a coffin onstage for Romeo and Juliet.”

Director Garnhum’s recollections of close calls are more epic.

The first incident came during a production of The Scarlet Pimpernel at the 2002 Stratford Festival. An elaborate expanse of netting came tumbling down, which was bad enough, says Garnhum, who directed Clue at RMTC last year.

“But what really did it in was, about three minutes later, we heard the sound of the screw gun. The audience thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.”

Garnhum’s other experience came while seated in the audience during the ill-fated Broadway production of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, a musical remembered both for its bloated budget (US$175 million) and its run-ins with flawed setcraft, leading several cast members and stunt doubles to experience severe injuries.

“I was in the audience when one of them fell,” says Garnhum, still shocked. “That was a show going wrong that kind of scarred me, and I think that was a major factor in making sure my productions are extra safe. Watching that happen was really painful.”

These stories illustrate the tremendous room for error inherent to any live production — the potential to tragically stumble into the orchestra pit or cleverly incorporate minor yet perceivable missteps into improvised solutions.

On Saturday Night Live, Stefon was a hit whether Bill Hader broke character or managed to play it straight, but on a more formally scripted stage, with no notice as to when an idiosyncrasy or wrong move might be introduced, the actors must make real-time decisions to disregard it or return to it via callback.

Most of the time, the professional quietly moves on, never turning back.

Garnhum says part of what elevates The Play That Goes Wrong is the way it lets the audience in on all the potential for error, illuminating the ways the top-liners and role players must adjust themselves, both onstage and off, in order to maintain the illusion of composure during the creation of a theatrical production, in this case a murder mystery.

“It’s about a troupe of actors who start and things just don’t go their way. They keep falling apart. They bump into each other, they forget their lines, they enter at the wrong time, and why that’s fun is that they they don’t give up. It is live, and because they’re theatre artists, they will do whatever they can to make it look OK and make it come through,” Garnhum says.

It’s part of the zany appeal of the conceit, which Garnhum describes as “a farce on steroids.”

“It’s a funny advantage. If we have a night when something goes wrong in our play, nobody knows. They can’t necessarily tell the difference between something going wrong that’s been planned or something going wrong that’s not,” says Garnhum.

“It’s amazing what an audience will accept to be true.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com