i think the most egregious example of the manic pixie dream girl trope was this play i but I just remembered seeing it, several years ago…
it was about this sad-sack guy driving across the country to try and reunite his old band for one last show
he’s accompanied by this girl who he was in the band with, back in the day… and he was in love with her then, and she’s cool & smart & funny & talks only to him for the entire play, even when the rest of the band joins him on the drive
& at the end of the play it turns out that she was a ghost the whole time, nobody else in the play could see or hear her, & the ‘last show’ he kept referring to is actually going to be her funeral wake bcs she died..
That her ghost had accompanied them on this trip bcs he was grieving & she wanted to help him let go of her…
which, you know, was a surprise & it was really emotional & legit the play was pretty good
But I just started thinking about it randomly…
And I keep being struck by the fact that the play only works if the entire audience is so used to the idea that a female character would literally only speak to the main male character for the entire length of a narrative.
Would only converse with him, interact with him, even when there were other people around.
That even as he talked about what he was doing next, she never discussed their future goals. She never touched any props or anyone other than him.
That nothing she did or said would genuinely have anything to do with herself as a person, except in the context of how he felt about her.
The entire play hinges on the audience not expecting anything hinky about a female character who acts like that,
& most of the audience bought it, hook, line, and sinker.
even I did. there was genuine feeling of surprise in the room
and I just…
A woman can literally be an incorporeal ghost & as long as she is emotionally supportive of a man we see her as a fully realistically person
if that isn’t a sad indictment of how female characters get treated idk what is, honestly
dukeofbookingham-deactivated202:
High school, okay man that’s stretching back a ways.
Okay so once upon a time I was in a production of Peter Pan where I played Hook’s first mate and we were the two gayest pirates to ever grace the stage at a children’s theatre. But, um, that’s really not important to the story.
Anyway this was kind of an old theatre and if I’m being totally honest with you it was falling the fuck apart. Now, most theatres have this hallway that runs end to end behind the stage (called the ‘crossover’) so that actors can exit on one side and enter again from the other. This theatre had that, but the door was old and rusty and gross and sometimes it would just get stuck shut, and I shit you not, there was no budging that thing without a battering ram or like a fucking siege engine or some shit.
So there’s this girl named Christina playing Tinker Bell and we have her in the pretty classic Disney getup–big blonde bun perched on top of her head, short little green dress, you know the look. And she has this exit where she has to dash off stage left and then enter again from stage right really fucking fast, so basically she’ll just walk off, run down the crossover and come back in. In theory. You can see where this is going, I’m sure.
One night Chris goes to make her exit and the crossover door is fucking stuck. She doesn’t have time to bang on it and get someone to open it or anything and she’s gotta fucking be there for her entrance because there are lights and music and shit because she’s a damn fairy and if she doesn’t appear it’ll look super fucking stupid. So she just bolts the fuck outside and starts sprinting like a cheetah around the back of the building. But this is in January, okay, and she’s in this green mini-dress and little slippers with no traction and she hits a patch of ice halfway across the parking lot and just goes fucking flying and just eats shit. But here’s the thing, guys–actors are metal as hell. The show must go the fun on, blood and broken bones be damned. (Really. The stories I could tell.)
So she scrambles off the ground and runs as fast as she fucking can and flings the loading dock door open and like crashes onstage just in the nick of time. But because she didn’t stop to see what the damage was, she didn’t realize her knees were like fucking shredded from wiping out in the parking lot and she’s bleeding fucking everywhere. Now, this is a kids’ show and some of these little fuckers are sitting like a foot from the stage so this is problem. They’re gasping and pointing and she does her bit and Hook and I kind of cut the scene short and usher her off before the kids start crying. We’re scrambling around in the wings trying to find a first aid kit and we finally lay hands on one and Hook is like trying to wipe the blood off Tinker Bell’s knees and she’s trying not to fucking cry and I’m digging through the box looking for fucking band aids. I finally find some and I’m like, “Oh, perfect, they’re green, it’ll just look like part of her costume, fuckin’ A, that’s grand.”
She grits her teeth, I slap like fucking eight band-aids on each of her knees and Hook hauls her out of her chair and shoves her onstage and we high-five like hell yeah, crisis averted. But then the lights go out for a scene change and we realize that because this is a fucking kids’ theatre, the fucking band-aids glow in the fucking dark. So you can just see these two like weird glowing green spots that are Christina’s knees as she runs around onstage and Hook and I are both like What the fuck? What is that? Oh no. But then thank God one of the Lost Boys has the presence of mind to just yell, “Look, Tink has a friend!” And for the rest of the show every time there was a blackout Chris ran back and forth across the stage and her knees were ‘fairies’ and the kids fucking loved it.
And that is the story of the time Tinker Bell wiped the fuck out and glow-in-the-dark band-aids became an last-minute special effect.
I love theatre, guys.
Beautiful.
Apparently my director went to see a production of West Side Story a few years ago, and the guy playing Chino forgot his gun before coming out for his final scene. Once it got to the big scene where he is supposed to shoot Tony, he screeched “Poison Boots” and kicked the actor playing Tony until he went down. The girl playing Maria then had to jerk the shoe off of Chino’s foot, and had to do the gunshot scene asking “How many kicks Chino? How many kicks, and one kick left for me”.
There should be a blog dedicated to theatrical urban legends. Like that opening weekend of Dracula where Dracula (still hungover) vomited all over the audience during the first stage direction that everyone has a friend of a friend that worked on the show and was there.
or the one where the bridge never came out for Javert’s suicide and so he just pretended to stab himself and then lay there until the lights went out
best story i heard was when a friend of mine saw a show where juliet forgot to bring the dagger out on stage so she just ripped the squib out of her chest and blood squirted everywhere
During a passion play a friend of my brother was supposedly in, one of the roman soldiers who was supposed to stab jesus on the cross and accidentally grabbed the wrong spear- he was supposed to grab one with a fake tip, but instead he grabbed one with an actual metal tip and, well
Jesus screamed “JESUS CHRIST YOU STABBED ME”.
Since that Jesus had to be taken down due to a bad case of stab-itis, the backup Jesus came in, but he weighed significantly less than the original Jesus- which would have been fine, except that at the end the cross was supposed to ascend upwards with Jesus on it, and the weights hadn’t been adjusted.
So Jesus, instead, ROCKETED UP into heaven (or, just, above the stage).
This is wild from start to finish
I was in Peter Pan once and one night at a performance, the adhesive holding our Hook’s mustache on was wearing off. It was near the end with a big fight scene and when he got attacked, he let his mustache fall and went “YOU RIPPED MY MUSTACHE OFF!” in a scandalized tone and it added a new note of hilarity to the whole scene (which was supposed to be funny anyway)
In my seventh grade play, which was a midsummer night’s dream, Thisbe didn’t have a sword so she stabbed herself with a coathanger
My junior year we were doing Romeo and Juliet and after Juliet poisons herself it was supposed to go dark and she’d get off the stage. well the light crew accidentally turned them back on and Juliet who was sitting up slammed back down on the wooden bed with a loud bang. To which my theater teacher says into the com “zombie Juliet” and everyone who heard that had to keep as quiet as possible while our eyes were filling with tears.i attended my county’s performing arts high school majoring in vocal studies, (mostly geared towards musical theater and opera styles) and once a year we got a field trip to new york (we were in jersey, so it’s not exactly far). we would do one touristy thing, an actor’s workshop with friends of our teachers working in various performing industries in nyc, and then see a show.
my first year doing this, our industry contacts were 1 actor, 1 casting director, and 1 producer to get different aspects of the business, and they all gave us amazing advice and told fantastic stories. the actor in question was Zazu on Broadway’s The Lion King for several years, and told the best story by far.
in The Lion King, there are only two pieces of pre-recorded noise in the whole show. one, when Pumbaa does a MASSIVE fart while fighting the hyenas, and the other being Mufasa saying REMEMBERRRRRR as Simba climbs Pride Rock. the actor told us while struggling not to laugh that, during one night’s performance, someone forgot to flip the tape of these pre-recorded noises.
so, at the end of the show, the great climax where Simba finally accepts his place in the Circle of Life, the heavens parted and-
PFFFFFFFFFRRRRRBTFTBTBFTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT
everyone froze. and then all ran off stage positively HOWLING with laughter.
the lesson: sometimes there are fuck ups you just can’t recover from.
Impossible!!
How do you even…. ?
This is the type of stage pageantry that people pay hundreds to see. Imagine how long the costume designer took intricately put into making those dresses the people behind the scene are the true heroes of theater