When I landed in Nashville I found out that my friend had gotten us free tickets to see the jukebox musical about the life and times of The Temptations for that night. We were about a dozen rows back and were excited to check it out when about an hour into the show lights near the emergency exits started flashing. No one seemed to be reacting but the lights kept going off and then eventually started talking about there being an emergency in the building. I looked up and the balcony seats were evacuating, but the show was still going on! Shortly after someone yelled “stop the production!” from the crowd and a voice came on saying “actors please clear the stage” and we were told to leave and that it was believed to not be an actual emergency but they’d let us know if we could go back inside or not.

We waited outside, but a lot of people started bailing out, but we were too curious to see what would end up happening and if the show would go on or not. After about 30 minutes outside, we were told we could come back in.  Everyone got some time to head back to their seats and the show picked up where it had left off – to thunderous applause.  I don’t know about you, but whenever we had a fire drill at my work, we never could just jump right back into it – we always had to discuss the fire drill for like an hour after we got back inside – so it was impressive that the cast just jumped right back in where they had left off.  Then it was time for the actual intermission (the guy next to us said the earlier one was an ‘outermission’) which I imagine was necessary for costume and set reasons and couldn’t have been skipped.  Act II began and we were what we thought to be maybe 10-15 minutes from the end?  Only for the lights to start flashing AGAIN!  This time they were a bit quicker to tell the actors to clear the stage – and the lead playing Otis yelled “SO CLOSE!” before exiting.  This time we were told we needed to evacuate again and that the show would NOT be continuing.  What we had seen so far was great, but I wish we had gotten to see the end!  It does sound like TPAC gave everyone who attended a refund for the tickets.  Maybe I’ll try to catch it when it is in Hartford to see how it ends.

 

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