On stage point of view.. - Actors Forum is the Community to Talk, Learn and Study Acting.

stacey · 08-02-2008, 08:31 PM

On stage, if a line is thrown off tempo or is grammatically changed, the whole show goes amiss. Unlike acting on film, you can still repeat the performance until you hear the word "cut!"
— hoping that your director is satisfied with your performance.

SWK78 · 08-02-2008, 11:39 PM

True enough, but you can bring yourself back up from any error usually by either paying it no mind and not letting it affect the performance or by doing minor ad-lib work to get the erred lines to become right again for the audience to understand. It takes practice to ad-lib correctly, and to ad-lib at the right times.

KateD · 09-11-2008, 07:22 AM

Oh yes, one of our performances got messed up really thoroughly a couple of years ago. Someone forgot one sentence, which isn't too bad ordinarily, but this sentence introduced a character that would come on stage some time later. Without that sentence, no one would understand the rest of the play. After a lot of cursing and sweating (the cursing was only done backstage, of course) the problem was fixed without anyone in the audience noticing.

Kate

SWK78 · 09-12-2008, 05:01 PM

When I did the play I'd bee working on back in August, there were many scenes in which people either forgot their lines or said them in the wrong order. I was one that messed up in a few scenes, but never did any of us let the audience know we'd messed up. Several lines went missing, cues for other people, and we all covered for one another phenomenally. We all knew the story well, and I knew it the best since I'd written it, so when people messed up their lines in a scene with me, it was especially easy to recover because I would butt in with a word or two to help them in setting themselves straight again. Others did this for me too on ocassion, but truly it all depends on the cast you have. Many of our actors were new to the acting experience, so they did not know how to cover for themselves as well as me and many of the others. But it all worked out fine. A diverse cast of varied backgrounds in experience will be the one thing that will save a play: how well your actors can cover for each other.