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I was once attending the opening of a big-budget musical when a piece of scenery that was supposed to glide on stage got jammed in the wings, lurched painfully around some obstacle and then limped into its proper place.

I'm not sure I would have noticed this glitch, and I certainly wouldn't remember it several years later, except that one of the show's designers was sitting in the row ahead of me, and he let out an anguished expletive at the sight.

Depending who you ask, the failure of Ben Heppner's voice at a Toronto concert last week was excruciatingly painful, terribly sad -- or barely perceptible. A colleague who was at the concert reports that the gentleman behind him was puzzled as to why Heppner was cutting his program short: This concertgoer had paid to hear the tenor sing and that's what he'd been hearing.

The world of the stage is full of stories about the things that go wrong -- the actor too nervous or too drunk to remember his lines; the dancer who stumbled; the singer who got a nosebleed; the scenery that collapsed; the mechanized prop that ran off its rails -- but the real potential for catastrophe seems to lie with the solo operatic voice. Maria Callas prematurely ruins her instrument with the daring singing of her youth; Luciano Pavarotti is booed for failing to hit the high notes at La Scala; fans hold their collective breath as Jose Carreras returns to the stage after treatment for leukemia.

No wonder such stories provide fodder for drama, from Terrence McNally's Callas biography Master Class to the fictional diva who embarrasses herself with a false note at the Opera Bastille in Michel Tremblay's recent play Impromptu on Nuns' Island. Out there all alone on a vocal tightrope, the singer's triumph is impossible to fake and failure difficult to hide.

In reality, of course, the disasters are rare and the audience is often surprisingly unaware that something is amiss. In an era where computers can create stage shows filled with thousands of perfectly timed, split-second sound and lighting effects while the autotuner can quietly fix a pop star's flat notes, live performance is increasingly asked to match the technical seamlessness of television, film and recorded music. As long as it does have that veneer of perfection, the audience tends to assume that what it is seeing and hearing is what is intended.

Performers will swap their war stories and critique every nuance of pace or tempo after the show, but out there in the audience many of us are deaf or blind to these finer points.

The actor can skillfully cover for the slipped line; we don't really believe our eyes when the dancer seems to falter and the moment passes in an instant; the singer has to stop the show and apologize before we realize something is seriously wrong.

Heppner, who went on to offer an inconclusive performance in Vancouver Sunday will test himself again in Montreal tonight.

He has attributed his problems simply to fatigue -- and to the stress of the media attention paid to a similar incident two years ago at Roy Thomson Hall after which he lost weight and weaned himself off blood-pressure medication that was interfering with his voice.

There has been nothing ghoulish or malicious, however, about the reaction to this more recent problem. In Master Class, Callas tells her students that nobody pays to see a performer try, but in this instance paying fans have honoured the past achievements without exhibiting any particular anger about the disappointing concert, while critics have been rightfully cautious about making any predictions or pronouncements since Heppner had been singing triumphantly in New York in March and has successfully completed several other international engagements in the past few months.

If the reaction to Heppner's show-stopping vocal failure is largely one of sympathetic concern, perhaps it's also because the performer has given us a timely reminder that performance should not be predictable, and that is what potentially makes performance great. We continually parrot the cliché that in a live show anything can happen, but most of the time, at least from the audience's perspective, the experience is safely controlled. Heppner has reminded us that the performer is not a machine; he's a man who can have a great night -- or a bad one.

In the circus, they say the acrobats will sometimes falter on purpose just to elicit a gasp from the audience. You can regard it as a cheap trick of the trade intended to manipulate the crowd. Or you could interpret it more benignly as a way of invoking performance's vivacity, showing the folks that behind the superhuman feat stands a fallible human creature.

ktaylor@globeandmail.ca

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