When the Mic Goes Out and the Magic Steps In
A microphone fails mid-show during Mamma Mia, and what happens next is the most purely theatre moment you can imagine - the whole room holding its breath together.
There's something that happens in live theatre that you just can't replicate anywhere else. It's not the songs or the sets or even the performances, as good as all of those things are. It's the fact that everyone in the room is sharing the same moment in real time. And this past weekend during our run of Mamma Mia, we got one of those moments in the most unexpected way.
The microphone on Lisa Heitzner, who plays Donna, stopped working. Right there on stage, mid-scene.
Backstage it got frantic fast. The easiest solutions were running through everyone's heads at once: have her lean into another actor's mic, get a handheld out there somehow. But the handheld was the question. Where was it? Who had it? Nobody was quite sure. I was standing in the wings waiting to go on for my scene with her. She sings her song, I walk out, we do our lines together, and I'm very aware that we've got a duet coming up. I'm thinking: how exactly is this going to work if she's singing directly into my microphone?
You could feel it everywhere. The tension backstage from the crew trying to solve a problem in real time. The tension from the audience, which is the part that gets me every time I think about it. They cared. They genuinely wanted the show to be great. They were worried for Lisa. You could sense it sitting in that room, this collective hope that someone was going to figure it out.
And then Paul Burnham came out. Part of the ensemble, completely in character, walked right onto that stage and handed Lisa a handheld microphone like it was the most natural thing in the world.
The sigh that went through that audience was audible. Not polite applause. Not a cheer. Just this exhale, this wave of collective relief, like the whole room had been holding its breath and finally let go together. She's got a mic. We can hear her. It's going to be OK.
And then she sang, and with a handheld it sounded almost like a rock concert. It was incredible.
What I keep coming back to is who was in that moment together. The audience obviously. The actors on stage. The crew backstage who were scrambling. The musicians in the pit who were right there with us, feeling every second of it. All of us wanting exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.
That's the thing about live theatre. It's genuinely shared. Not a recording, not a stream, not something you can pause or rewind. The same air, the same room, the same heartbeat for a few hours. If you haven't had that experience, please go find it. Go sit in a theatre, a community theatre, any theatre, and share in something with a room full of strangers. You won't regret it.
The photos below are production shots from our dress rehearsal of Mamma Mia, taken by the very talented Sherwood McLernon.
