Stage alcohol

Stage Alcohol. I recently did the props for a production which called for the actors to drink an awful lot of red wine. Hurray for black currant juice! Very palatable, once we'd established mix of juice to water. I found that adding a couple of drops of blue food colouring to the bottle gave a good colour on stage.

I never got the chance to fiddle with the "whiskey" though. Had to use flat dry giner ale due to quantity to be drunk and apple juice, whilst it's a better colour, can have a nasty effect on digesitve systems if drunk to excess. A single drop of yellow maybe?

Anyone got any tips for a good "white wine"? Will probably come up in next farce and I'm anxious to avoid the lime juice the director has suggested as it tastes vile (well, it does to me and a couple of other actors I know so...)

Rapunzel.

Faced with a red wine gag running through a 50 minute one-actor last year, I opted for a no alcohol wine (actually about 0.5% from memory). I gagged at the thought of drinking grape juice or black current juice: too sweet. I found a brand in Coles (again, me memory's going, but I think the brand was Billabong). Anyway you can find it in the supermarket shelves. It cost about $7.50 a bottle and we went through about half a bottle a performance! And, it looked the real thing! There was the night, though, that some interfering good-hearted soul, who should never have been backstage anyway, topped up the wine left from the previous performance with strong black tea from another of the props - a bottle, which we had never intended to open. We nearly did gag on stage and were bilious for the rest of the night. I had a series of rapid costume changes: on another night the same soul moved my carefully hung and ordered clothes. You can imagine that I was in full flight after the show..... I wasn't impressed!!!! Jim

Too sweet!

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