A production of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” in New York’s Public Theater. Actors and stage hands alike must contend with critters on the loose at the Central Park outdoor venue.
This summer, Anne Hathaway was upstaged by a family of raccoons.
At one performance of "Twelfth Night" starring Ms. Hathaway as Viola at New York's Shakespeare in the Park, several baby raccoons wailed loudly throughout the first act. Another night, as Ms. Hathaway's character pleaded Duke Orsino's case to Countess Olivia, a fat raccoon lumbered onto the stage behind her, drawing hoots of laughter from the audience. Some evenings, the animals blocked the stage entrances, prompting crew members to clap, click and whistle backstage to get them to move.
As the summer performance season enters full swing, nature is invading outdoor stages around the country. A group of wild turkeys started gobbling from stage right during a recent performance of Noël Coward's "Private Lives" at the California Shakespeare Theater in Orinda, Calif. A bear ran across the lawn at the Jacob's Pillow dance festival in Becket, Mass. Workers nervously kept an eye out for alligators that lurk around a venue used by the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C.
Newcomers are finding that the pastoral beauty of an al fresco setting can come with a few surprises. Seattle's Balagan Theatre tried its first-ever outdoor show this summer, a month-long production of "The Taming of the Shrew" staged under a bridge. At a performance on opening weekend, the audience consisted mostly of families and Shakespeare lovers -- until naked people covered in sparkly body paint joined the crowd.
Putting on a show of their own, mischievous raccoons are interfering with outdoor summer theater productions.
"An old trick in theater is to envision people without their clothes on so you're not as nervous," says actress Annie Jantzer, who saw the free-spirited celebrants from a nearby summer solstice festival filter into the audience. "In that actual situation, it has the opposite effect."
_________________________________
More from Wall Street Journal & MSN:
- Life Before Air Conditioning
- Travel Through History
- Beijing's Underground Music Scene
- Slide Show: Extreme Coasters
_________________________________
Outdoor theater performances have a storied history stretching back to the days of Greek tragedy. Today, some actors struggle to coexist with their natural surroundings. Theatre of the Big Bend, in Alpine, Texas, stages its outdoor shows near a natural spring on a hill dotted with cottonwood trees, scrub oak and prickly pear cactus. During a recent rehearsal, an actor spotted a scorpion just as the group was about to run through a dream sequence in a Spanish-English comedy. Amid screams, a cast member who's from the area stomped over in his cowboy boots and squashed it.
