Angry Tenor Hurls Watch at Soprano For Breaking Chair

I don’t know if last night’s show is going to reviewed, but if it is, the headline might read something like, “Angry Tenor Hurls Watch at Soprano For Breaking Chair.”  That may have been what happened, but that was not my motivation.  I think I should start at the beginning.

It all started when the conductor made the classic mistake of telling the cast that there might be a reviewer in the house.  If you have seen “Waiting For Guffman,” then you know what that does to a cast.  “Don’t do anything crazy,” he told us.  “Let’s make this the best performance ever.”  So of course we all went crazy.

To start with, in Act 1 Patchy Kayak, the lead soprano, broke the chair.  I was not on stage when this happened, but I am told that she broke it in spectacular fashion, sitting on it as the back legs gave out, sending her flying down and backwards.  All Ms. Kayak could do was throw her arms up in the air and smile, and so that’s what she did.  Luckily, last night was the night they were making the archival video, so we will all hopefully get to see it at some point.

This brings us to Act 2, which was full of the excitement of live theater.  No chairs were broken as far as I know, but the major problem came when Patchy and I were singing our famous “watch duet.”  For those of you unfamiliar with Die Fledermaus, the watch duet is the pivotal moment in the show in which I (in disguise) am trying to woo my wife (also in disguise) with my rare and valuable pocket watch.  During the course of the song, she tricks me out of my watch and the duet ends with her laughing that I will not woo any more girls with my watch and me lamenting the loss of my watch.  At least that is what is supposed to happen.

What actually happened, was that she forgot to steal my watch.  I am sitting next to her dangling it in front of her face, and she just ignores me.  As the duet progresses, I start getting more nervous, so I place the watch on my open palm and put it under her nose.  It is at this point that she walks away from me, crossing stage right, leaving me sitting in a chair, still dangling the watch.  As my next line is “She took my watch away from me, how unkind,” I start to really panic.  Not knowing what else to do, I jump up, pretend I am tripping over the chair, and just chuck the dang watch across the stage at my lovely colleague.  It hits the stage and slides to a halt directly to her right, at which point she glances down, looks surprised, and scoops up the watch, dropping it into her cleavage.  The scene is saved!

Now, I am no longer in the correct spot, so a quick re-blocking of the scene is necessary, but afterwards people told us that it looked very natural and that it could have been blocked that way very easily.  So you see, my pegging the pocket watch at her had nothing to do with the fact that she was crashing through the furniture in Act 1, and everything to do with sudden desperation.  And I don’t even know if the reviewer came or not, but at least we got it all on video.