Cyndi Toushan Spots a UFI

You never know what’s going to happen during a theatre performance. I guess that’s part of the thrill for Cyndi Toushan and UFIs.

It was a typical matinee of My Fair Lady and all was running like clockwork when toward the end of Act One, the audience focus suddenly shifted.

I had come down from Information Central to the Festival Theatre Aisles to attend this performance with my mother.

Suddenly she nudged me.

Veteran actor Barry McGregor who was playing Colonel Pickering, had acquired an enormous Unidentified Flying Insect on the back of his jacket.

Of course, to the audience's immense delight, Macgregor continued his lines, UFI accessory notwithstanding, opposite Colm Feore as Professor Henry Higgins.

SM Cyndi, armed with mega-powerful binocs, had now espied the interloping creepy crawler watching its every move through the hypotenuse triangular window of Information Central.

As McGregor emerged for his next scene, the audience snickered.

The pesky hitchhiker was now front and centre deciding to rest momentarily on Pickering's elegant burgundy ascot. After flying about the stage further amusing itself and the audience, it landed for a luverly cuppa brew on the Higgins household tea trolley, before repositioning itself on the carpet.

To Cyndi's great relief, Colm Feore stamped his foot in perfect time affecting the giant UFI's public demise while singing "I'm An Ordinary Man".

But this was no ordinary bug!

"We leave the back doors open when we strike the stage, to let in the air, and all of sorts of things fly in including birds sometimes. We had been trying to find that bug for three days. It was wonderful the way Colm desposed of it in time to the music." she laughed.

Barry Macgregor does not recall his Supporting Player, but cackled with laughter at the thought of it and Cyndi's dilemma.

"Ah, darling Cyndi! I don't remember that particular occasion, but I do know that they can be very, very annoying.

In that scene in The Lark ( 2005 season) when Joan, Amanda Plummer, is in the cell in the end, there is just the one hanging light over the centre of the stage.

Well, there was a moth flying around in that and it was totally acceptable.

It's weird isn't it? If you're at home and a bug's in the house, there's a bug in the house flying around, everybody accepts it. But you go into a stage and everyone goes, well, they obviously don't look after the theatre. They've got a bug on the stage, and I think, wait a minute... wait a minute .... here we are trying to tell this story, and we have a bug which is helping us and you are in actual fact more interested in that because it shouldn't be there. It is a very weird aspect of the theatre."

Just one of many during a day in the life Stratford Festival Stage Manager Cynthiahh Toushan!