Stop the Show! A History of Insane Incidents and Absurd Accidents in the Theater

Stop the Show! is the first book to assemble humorous, frightening and bizarre anecdotes about the history of all that went wrong during live theatrical productions in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. It is the publishing equivalent of TV bloopers for the legitimate stage. This book includes stories from top directors, actors, playwrights and technicians from New York, Los Angeles, and points in between, to the United Kingdom, from the 19th century to today. There are stories about missed entrances and exits, onstage unscripted fights between performers, improvised lines, accidental pratfalls, falling scenery, and costume, lighting and makeup screwups. The backstage provides sordid tales of practical jokes, treachery, misplaced props, wild arguments, and generally the kinds of things Michael Frayn created for his farce about a theatrical disaster, Noises Off. This book doesn't leave out the theatergoers either, who snore, fight with each other, talk back to the performers, search for their seats, become suddenly ill, eat, drink, make merry, and are yelled at by the performers all of which sometimes prompts the show to stop, even though we've always been told it must go on.

Brad Schreiber attended San Francisco State University, majoring in English/Creative Writing. He studied with Kay Boyle and Leonard Wolf and co-founded two theatre-comedy troupes, performing TV, stage, radio and clubs throughout the Bay Area. He co-founded the San Francisco Playwrights Center in 1980, won a residency grant from the Edward Albee Foundation and has had his work produced in Los Angeles, Dallas, New York and San Francisco. At the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, as a playwright, he workshopped with Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin. His radio work includes winning an award from the National Audio Theatre Festivals in Missouri for his adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s The One Who Waits. He also adapted Philip K. Dick’s Sales Pitch and Lewis Padgett’s The Proud Robot, the latter for the Nebula Award winning series 2000X. All aired on NPR. Upon moving to Los Angeles, Schreiber co-founded the New One Act Theatre Ensemble, worked as an executive, writer and producer at PBS affiliate KCET and began his careers as journalist and author. Schreiber is in his 11th year as columnist for L.A.’s oldest weekly newspaper, Entertainment Today and writes theatre criticism for Back Stage West. Schreiber is also author of the best-selling parody of the Guinness Book of World Records, Weird Wonders and Bizarre Blunders (Simon and Schuster) and the humor writing how-to, What Are You Laughing At? (Michael Wiese) He is currently Vice President of Storytech Literary Consulting, founded by Chris Vogler (The Writer’s Journey) and is Supervising Producer on the Court TV series North Mission Road, inspired by his book on the L.A. Coroner’s office, Death in Paradise (Four Walls Eight Windows). His most recent theatre credit was Multimedia Consultant on the world premiere production of What I Heard About Iraq at the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood.