I’m in the middle of a theatre holiday in Europe, and as part of that saw Les Miz in Eindhoven, Netherlands, including the final performance on Sunday 1 October. This matinee was the last show in Eindhoven and also the final performance of several cast members before the production moves to Antwerp, Belgium, with some new cast members joining.

There’s a theatre tradition of the “muck-up matinee” where actors either deliberately muck something up, or try to cause someone else to muck up, and this Sunday afternoon performance of Les Miz was one of those. I noticed three different things that were definitely deliberate and another one which may have been a genuine mistake or could have also been deliberate:

• After “Little Fall of Rain”, the students didn’t carry Eponine off into the wings, but instead deposited her behind the table upstage right. So she was lying there “dead” throughout all of “Drink With Me” and “Bring Him Home”. Everyone on that side of the stage kept on looking down at her - very somberly (cause, you know, she was “the first of us to fall upon this barricade”) - and had to gingerly navigate themselves around the body (cause there wasn’t a lot of room to move). They finally picked her up and carried her off at “Let all the women and fathers of children [and corpses] go from here”. I don’t know if this was done at Vajen van den Bosch’s (the Eponine) request, or if it was a prank played on her (as it was her last show, a new Eponine joining in Antwerp), but it was pretty funny if you spotted it - which, granted (because her body was lying behind the table), was pretty difficult to to.
• During the wedding when the Thenardiers did the plate gag - ie when it fell from Madame Thenardier’s dress and clatters onto the ground - instead of the Thenardiers (Yannick Plugers, whose last show it was also, and understudy Kim Reizevoort) looking up and pointing as if to say “It must have fallen from the sky”, they instead did a choreographed little dance step and loudly exclaimed “Tadaaa!!” to the audience. I cracked up but I think I was the only one. I guess if you hadn’t seen the show before you wouldn’t know they did something different. (And in fact the gag changes sometimes from production to production - for instance in London at the moment they don’t do the falling plate gag because the stage is so steeply raked it would risk the plate rolling into the audience.)
• A bit later during “Beggar at the Feast” Madame Thenardier also did a little ballet routine at the “This one’s a queer but what can you do line”. This line, by the way, I’m pretty sure is changed for the Dutch version to convey something like “Here are all these posh people, but instead I ended up with … that”. based on the way Thenardier points at his wife during the line.
• The other mistake - the one which I’m not sure was deliberate or not - was during the “Heart Full of Love” reprise. Sem Gerritsma who plays Cosette totally missed the high note at the end of the song (“Not a dream after all”). The note started in a squeak and then just totally cut out. It’s not the sort of mistake that I think you would choose to do deliberately, but it is something that if (for example) she saw something funny in the wings it might cause her to miss it. On the other hand, it was not Sem Gerritsma’s last night (as opposed to the Eponine and Thenardier), and that note is a pretty difficult one to hit anyway, being even higher than the first “Heart Full of Love” in Act 1 (although she’s hit it every other time I’ve seen her play the role). So I think this one might have been a genuine flub.

Anyway, have you ever seen any performers muck around in a show, professional or otherwise? If so, what happened?