In my own mind, I award gold stars to actors who perform acts of extraordinary technical assistance while onstage. Today we had several worthy candidates.

In the party scene, Romeo dropped his (thankfully plastic) champagne glass, which is filled with diluted tea. Almost as soon as it fell, several party guests and servants were wiping it up with their handkerchiefs. One of the things I find most important with a new company is figuring out which actors have a special awareness of these kind of things and will take the initiative to fix onstage mishaps.

When Romeo threw his coat on the back of a bench and it slid off the back, Friar Laurence (Ray Chapman) picked it up and dusted it off completely in character, and laid it back on the bench nicely, which saves the scene change at the end where Romeo needs to grab it quickly.

And finally, Benvolio’s hat somehow got stuck onstage just upstage of a bench centerstage, where it would be very difficult to get it off through most of the very dramatic scenes in Act II. I didn’t think it was worth trying to get it off for the next half hour or so. Myxolydia Tyler, who plays a combination of Capulet servants we have compressed into one character named Perrin, had a plan, though, so I said she should try. What she did was the greatest act of sleight-of-hand I have ever witnessed in a career filled with actors trying to nonchalantly get incongruous props offstage. She hid a HAT, while also dealing with a serving tray and two (real) glasses filled with liquid, while standing, sitting, and then standing again and exiting. It was amazing.

I also have to give credit to Penny, our director, as during the rehearsal process when these kind of things would happen, she would stress to the actors the importance of dealing with unexpected events in a realistic manner, both because it makes sense to the audience, and because it’s often necessary for technical reasons to get things off the stage that shouldn’t be there. I very much appreciated her emphasis on that.

This was the first show where we really had to deal with these kind of problems, and I’m very impressed with how the cast responded.