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" Can anyone here play the drums? I mean someone good!"
There must be some mistake
I didnt mean to let them
Take away my soul.
Am I too old, is it too late?
Ooooh, Ma, Ooooh Pa,
Where has the feeling gone?
Ooooh, Ma, Ooooh Pa,
Will I remember the songs?
The show must go on.
Accidents happen. Sometimes, a catastrophe occurs during the production of a creative work that forces it to a halt - the writer quits, the union goes on strike, or an actor gets injured or suffers critical existence failure. In recorded works intended for later consumption, this can be remedied relatively easily - scenes can be rewritten or reshot, actors can be replaced, shooting can be put on hiatus.
However, in live entertainment, the show must go on at all costs - unlike with a movie or a TV show, a live performance has an audience of potentially tens of thousands of people, who have all paid to be there, and are rightfully expecting to get their money's worth. This forces the characters into crazy improvisations, costume changes, awkward stealth to avoid further disrupting the show and any number of desperate things to keep the show going.
Note that the full phrase is something like "the show must go on tonight" (i.e. whatever personal tragedy happens during the day, everyone must be in place and ready to perform when the curtain rises).
Compare Throw It In. See also All Part of the Show, Dead Line News, Pushed in Front of the Audience.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
Fairy Tales
- The Emperor's New Clothes: What's the Emperor to do when it's revealed his marvelous new clothes don't really exist and he's naked? Pretend not to have heard the complaint, hold himself up stiffer and straighter than ever, and continue with the procession, that's what.
Film
- The Marx Brothers A Night At The Opera where the brothers throw an opera into total chaos and the theatre crew and police still bend over backwards to avoid disrupting the show themselves, even when things are bad enough that logically they might as well simply and openly march out on stage to grab the brothers since it would not make any difference.
- Galaxy Quest:
Jason Nesmith: You will go out there. Alexander Dane: I won't. And nothing you can say will make me. Jason Nesmith: "The show must go on." Alexander Dane: ( beat) Damn you. Damn you!
- In Moulin Rouge!, Satine is dying from tuberculosis and everyone's hopes and dreams are falling apart, but they still manage to stage "Spectacular! Spectacular!" Guess what The Song Before The Storm is?
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother: Sigerson Holmes and Professor Moriarty (and their minions) engage in a secret contest behind the scenes of an opera performance to get some important papers. Their shenanigans include dropping sleeping pills into the cups the actors are drinking from, firing guns and breaking into song: the actors try desperately to keep the opera going despite the interruptions.
- Lampshaded in Shakespeare in Love, apparently set before the phrase was popularised:
Henslowe: The show must... you know...
- A more tragic case in Stage Door; on opening night of her debut, Terry finds out Kay, an actress she was friends with, had her heart set on the part Terry was about to play, and when she didn't get the part, committed suicide. Upon hearing this, Terry is heartbroken and refuses to go on; Ann Luther, her acting coach, gives a variation of this speech to get Terry to perform.
- In Henry's Crime, Henry goes back on stage and continues his role as if nothing's wrong, immediately after getting shot in the leg. Justified because if he hadn't, it would have aroused suspicion.
Literature
- The name of a chapter in a The Berenstain Bears book in which Brother and Sister bear attempt to help a horseback riding teacher save her building by means of a fundraiser to pay the mortgage. In the chapter, the villains have been defeated and prevented from sabotaging the fundraiser in their bid to gain control of the building, but despite the problems they have, they still have to hold the event to get the necessary money.
- In Maskerade, this is the philosophy of the Ankh-Morpork Opera House, where a show cannot stop even if the lead singer is dead (they recruit another from the audience, or work the corpse via ventriloquism). When someone actually does stop a show (as it's Discworld) the resulting entropic shockwave physically flings Walter Plinge, a man truly in tune with opera, from his seated position.
- This is Rachel's motto in No More Dead Dogs, even as early back as kindergarten. At the end of the book she convinces everyone to remain performing the play with these words after the Old Shep dog is blown up with a cherry bomb.
Live-Action TV
Music
- Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury contracted AIDS and was in increasingly poor health through the last few years of his career. He kept recording though, as, well you know. The band lampshaded it with an absolute Tear Jerker of a song named, unsurprisingly, The Show Must Go On. Also qualifies as a Real Life example.
- Averted by Emilie Autumn, who would pause shows if something went wrong on stage.
Professional Wrestling
- The WWF suffered this trope in 1999 during their Over The Edge pay-per-view event, due to the death of Owen Hart happening as he was making his ring entrance.
- This actually happens often in professional wrestling. The most common causes are legit injuries and/or botched moves, or in rarer cases, botched use of props, weapons or equipment.
- We'll say that professional wrestling is like this in general. As a recent Cracked article put it, a wrestler is supposed to stay in character no matter what happens. Your opponent is legitimately trying to injure you? Ignore it and stay in character. You tore your ACL? Broke your ribs? Don't break character. One of the competitors died during the match? You can't even let that break keyfabe.
Real Life
- During a 1973 concert in San Francisco, drummer Keith Moon of The Who passed out due to a drug reaction. Rather than stop the show, the band recruited an amateur drummer (the late Scott Halpin) from the audience to replace him and finish the show.
- Similarly, a 2002 performance by Counting Crows in Los Angeles saw drummer Ben Mize fall ill mid-show, requiring his hospitalization. After a brief intermission, the band switched to acoustic instruments and performed several songs without a drummer, before drummers Randy Guss of Toad the Wet Sprocket (their opening band) and Todd Roper of CAKE (who was in the audience) were persuaded to appear onstage to finish the show.
- Naturally, anybody who has appeared in live performances can testify to problems involved in cast members, problems with props or any number of unforeseen difficulties. The universal rallying cry is, in all circumstances, the Trope Title.
- Comic Red Skelton, on a live 1950s show, was doing a sketch with a cow, which started defecating, for a very long time. Needless to say, the audience was in stitches, and Red spent the interval pulling faces, holding his nose, and telling the cow "No ad-libbing!"
- On an episode of The Honeymooners, recorded live, Jackie Gleason was supposed to enter the scene but, for some reason, didn't for a couple of minutes. Art Carney, alone on stage, filled the time getting an orange from the refrigerator, peeling it, and managing to make it funny.
- Reportedly, when recording "The Show Must Go On" (mentioned above), Freddie Mercury was in seriously bad shape because of his battle with AIDS. One of the other band members approached him and asked him if he wanted to take a break. What Mercury did was down a glass of vodka and say "I'll fucking do it, darling!" before proceeding to nail the song in one take in what Brian May considers one of Freddie's greatest performances.
- Before opening night of RENT, composer Jonathan Larson collapsed and died. Needless to say, the cast moved on to perform the next night.
- What's more, when the cast was told, they decided to pay their respects by just singing through it seated around a table. By the time they got to "La Vie Boheme", everyone simultaneously agreed that Jonathan would want to see the show as it was meant to be, got up, and did the entire rest of the show, sans costumes.
- When a member of one of the Big Name Bands headlining at the Download musical festival fell ill on the night, members of several other bands performing at the festival stepped in to take his place for the set list, to prevent a possible riot if one of the bands that almost everyone wanted to see didn't perform as scheduled.
Theater
- This is the entire plot of Noises Off.
- The plot of Curtains kicks off when the star of a musical in tryouts in Boston is murdered after a performance. The rest of the cast plan to go back to New York, and one of the producers tries to get them to stay for the rest of the preview period by singing "The Show Must Go On," but the actors are not convinced. It isn't until the detective on the case reminds them that they're "Show People" that they decide to stay.
- Subverted catastrophically Pippin. When Pippin refuses to perform the final scene of the show (which has No Fourth Wall), the Players try to exhort him to continue, with remarks like, "Hey, you're not going to disappoint all these people at $25 a seat, are you?" But when they see that Pippin is firmly determined not to commit Self Immolation, they retaliate by taking away the lights, costumes and makeup. The Leading Player apologizes to the audience that the promised finale cannot be presented, offers the part to anyone in the audience, and then orders everybody out, including the orchestra, leaving Pippin, Catherine and Theo to end the show on a denuded dark stage.
Video Games
- The opera in Final Fantasy VI gets completely derailed when the party and an enemy end up crashing down on it from above. They end up improvising completely non sequitur roles on the spot. Hilarity Ensues when the theater owner decides to Throw It In and has the orchestra cue up the appropriate music.
- By completely derailing, we mean a treasure hunter and two companions which may include the king, a feral teenager, a ninja, and a samurai, fighting an octopus, using powers believed to have vanished a thousand years ago, in the middle of a tragic love story, concluding with the female lead (played by a general of a rival nation's army) being abducted by the pilot of a zeppelin.
- Final Fantasy IX features a circumstance VERY similar to the FFVI example above in the opening sequence, when the main character's Thieves' Guild disguise themselves as an acting troupe performing the most popular play in the world as a guise to kidnap Princess Garnet. When Zidane, Garnet, and Captain of the Guard Steiner find themselves on stage in the midst of the production, Hilarity Ensues as they take the plot Off the Rails entirely in their bid to escape. And the Queen still loves it!
- Baldurs Gate 2 featured the start of a character recruitment quest happen at a theater where a recruitable NPC was kidnapped prior to the show. True to the trope, Biff the Understudy steps up to fill the role and delivers a wooden, stuttering, uninspired and all-around dreadful performance.
Western Animation
- Played for laughs in the King of the Hill episode where Bobby inherits a famous ventriloquist's dummy that was modeled after a stereotypical football-playing high school A-student... only to become dismayed when his father likes the dummy's "antics" more than Bobby's own. Bobby grows to hate this new attention, but mutters "the show must go on" when he realizes that being at the edge of the spotlight is better than not having attention at all. (Luckily, the trope is kinda subverted in the end when Hank isn't a total bastard - after the first dummy is destroyed, he decides to nurture Bobby by building him a new dummy that far more resembles the boy himself.)
- In the Animated Adaptation of Madeline and the Gypsies, this is the reason the Gypsy Mama gives for putting Madeline and Pepito in a lion costume (as the real lion is sick).
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