Originally posted by MartyW Wow... Glad I'm not in Tony's next show... (lol)   Some of them, though long past thier prime, were based on real reasons.  In the time of the bard, "rigging" was best done by unemployed sailors.  As Cue's the sailors used some of the whistles that had been used on ship to tell them when it was time to fly in curtain or set peice... Whistling back stage could potentially confuse them and cause pieices to come in when it was undesirable, like when an actor was still under them..  But hey..  Most places just follow them as fun.. Not me of course.. I follow them because I'm a gulible member of the masses...

"Without our tradition, we'd be like a, like a fiddler on the roof!"

I certainly do have my quirks once I'm inside a theatre; you'll never hear me utter the name of "The Scottish Play" or wishing someone good luck under its roof...

But my best superstition story comes from not from a community theatre, but from an actual professional gig a few years ago... I was on the running crew for a production of The Nutcracker.  We had two flashpots, for the transition to the battle scene, and when the Nutcracker becomes the prince.  Final dress, we fired the flashpot and all seemed to be well.  The scene changed, the christmas tree grew, and we flew the backdrop of the living room out to reveal the mouse king's battle set... a minute or so later, we hear over the headset from the flyrail:  "Um... guys?  This backdrop is on fire."  We stopped the show, lowered the drop, and extinguished it.  No open flame, but an ever-widening smoldering hole, and the flash pot was the clear culprit.

As we examined our flash powder, we saw that it had "Sparkle Additive"... we theorized that one of the sparkles landed on the drop (which was rather old and dry) and started to smolder.  We had no time to order new powder, so we resorted to filling spray bottles with water and making sure that backdrop was pretty well doused before we fired the first flashpot.  Next day, opening performance, it worked!  ...and then the second flash pot ignited a small fire in the fireplace (which is a good place for it to be, honestly).  Luckily it was struck soon after, and duly doused.

At this point we began to resort to theatrical sorcery to protect ourselves.  Aside from wetting the set, at the next performance we wrote "NO FIRE" on our two charges in silver sharpie.  And, poetically enough... they didn't fire at all.  Duds!  Sometimes sorcery is too literal.

At every subsequent performance, we silver-sharpied a more clear set of instructions, "BIG BOOM NO FIRE" on each and every charge, and every one performed as expected.   Big boom, no fire.

So, to this day, no flashpot is complete without a BIG BOOM NO FIRE command scripted on it... lest the curse of "The Firecracker" come back to haunt me!