Wednesday, October 18, 2017
Marilyn Manson on Stage Injury: 'The Pain Was Excruciating'
Rolling Stone: Marilyn Manson detailed the recent, dangerous stage mishap that resulted in a painful leg injury and nine canceled tour dates. "I only recently watched the video of it," the singer told Yahoo of the viral concert clip. "I can see how it could look terrifying. It was terrifying for me, because the truss was not secured properly."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I’m honestly surprised that he only had he had to cancel nine performances considering how tight and intense his tour schedule is. There were some other surprising things about how this event occurred that are worth noting. If you watch the video of the accident, the band continues to play for at least 5-7 more seconds after the prop collapsed. In a theatrical setting, the stage manager would be able to hold the performance and bring in the house curtain, however at concert in a venue like this Hammerstein Ballroom, everything is out in the open. There isn’t that much you can hide from the audience, so I’d be interested to learn more about how the rest of the event was handled and who was handling it. From a safety aspect, this is something that production managers deal with a lot. How do you “actor-proof” something? The columns in Love’s Labor’s Won are being bolted into the stage deck and weighted with stage weights for reasons exactly like this. Stage weights would not have prevented this, but it would have showed that someone thought about it.
I would like to know if Manson did stuff like this in previous shows, and it worked out okay, or if this was a new thing that he decided to do without running it by anyone. I feel like the person planning the set and struts on stage would have thought about something like this happening, considering the type of performer that Marilyn Manson is. From the video itself, it doesn’t seem like the set is even bolted to the stage, which I would think would be almost necessary for this exact reason. The challenge of fixing a structure like that in a sturdy but non permanent way is a tough issue to solve. I wonder what I would hear if I was a fly on the wall in the room where they are discussing how to fix the issue.
I'm somewhat not surprised to hear that Marilyn Manson is taking this whole fiasco pretty professionally and keeping the focus on his remaining tour dates. What really interested me about this particular article is that they reported that Manson had claimed that the "truss was not secured properly", as it brings up an interesting question about whether or not it was really secured "properly" or secured properly in the sense that it would be pulled on or climbed on. When we have scenic elements in theatre that we know are going to be stood on, pulled on, climbed on, or otherwise interacted with by performers, we tend to build them differently to guarantee their safety. However, at the same time, I would hope that whoever is doing technical designs for a Marilyn Manson show would assume that anything on stage, and especially truss, would need to be designed in a way that it can take a beating. It seems as though there was a lapse in judgement here either on the side of the load in crew who installed the truss or the technical designers who had not designed the truss to be pulled or climbed on.
Post a Comment