My favorite "the audience really doesn't notice" story: I was running sound for one of Wellesley's theater productions my sophomore year (I think?), so I'm up in the catwalks with Stacey, a fellow techie, who's running lights. One of the night of the performance, Rob, our theater ghost*, decides to screw with us by messing with the lights so they're flickering. Badly. REALLY badly - there's no way it's not noticeable. Poor Stacey's going crazy trying to do SOMETHING to fix it short of shutting everything down (we are, of course, in the middle of one of the dramatic soliloquies). Finally, she does the best thing she can think of, and picks the light board up to about three inches off the table and drops it, making a small crashing noise. It works, and the lights behave themselves for the rest of the performance.
After the performance, somebody complimented the director on the thunder & lightning effects she put into the dramatic scene.
So even if they notice the errors, they'll assume they're intentional.
* I am perhaps the least superstitious person I know, and I don't believe in ghosts or supernatural crap or anything - except when it comes to theater and baseball. :)
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My favorite "the audience really doesn't notice" story: I was running sound for one of Wellesley's theater productions my sophomore year (I think?), so I'm up in the catwalks with Stacey, a fellow techie, who's running lights. One of the night of the performance, Rob, our theater ghost*, decides to screw with us by messing with the lights so they're flickering. Badly. REALLY badly - there's no way it's not noticeable. Poor Stacey's going crazy trying to do SOMETHING to fix it short of shutting everything down (we are, of course, in the middle of one of the dramatic soliloquies). Finally, she does the best thing she can think of, and picks the light board up to about three inches off the table and drops it, making a small crashing noise. It works, and the lights behave themselves for the rest of the performance.
After the performance, somebody complimented the director on the thunder & lightning effects she put into the dramatic scene.
So even if they notice the errors, they'll assume they're intentional.
* I am perhaps the least superstitious person I know, and I don't believe in ghosts or supernatural crap or anything - except when it comes to theater and baseball. :)