I've been acting in school plays and community theatre since I was in the 4th grade and I played "An Old Man" in my class' production of (I'm not kidding, I've got people who can back me up on this) Shakespeare's Macbeth. So obviously I've been around other amateur actors. Let me tell you, actors have some pretty weird superstitions, and they (for the most part) take them very seriously.
Let's start with one of the more famous ones shall we? Actors think it's bad luck to wish someone good luck. Instead actors say, "Break a leg!" There are a lot of differing theories as to why we say break a leg instead of, for example, "Bad luck!" or "Break a fingernail!" but I'll get into the theories in a moment. Now as I've been in several musicals, I'd also like to point out that you don't say "Break a leg!" to a dancer, for obvious reasons. Instead dancers say "Merde!" which is French for "Shit!" I think that goes back to ballet being very popular in France (I was going to say originated in France, but decided to look it up and discovered that it originated in Italy). There are probably other replacements for wishing someone good luck, but those are the one's I'm familiar with.
Now, let's get back to "Break a leg!" and it's origins. I'm going to start with the most absurd theory I've heard, the "Lincoln Theory." It starts with a fact, John Wilkes Booth (who was an actor), after shooting President Lincoln jumped to the stage and broke his leg. The theory being that you're wishing the actor you are telling to break a leg, that they will be remembered. Here's the thing though, John Wilkes Booth isn't remembered as an actor, he's remembered as an assassin (a job-title so nice, they put ass in it twice). Plus, the earliest documentation of the phrase "Break a leg" is from the 1920s. You'd think that if it came from 1865, there would be an earlier mention of the phrase.
Another theory is that back in the days of ancient Greek theatre, instead of applauding the audiences would stomp their feet. So in wishing someone "Break a leg" you're hoping that the audience will stomp their feet so hard, someone will break their leg. A similar (though less grim) theory is that in Elizabethan times, the audience would pick up their chairs and bang them on the floor, so you're wishing someone in the audience would break the leg of their chairs. Given how morbid the first theory is, and how hard it would be to bang your chair compared to clapping your hands, added to the fact that again, the first documentation of the phrase "Break a leg" is from the 1920s so these are not likely.
Now that we have the crazy theories out of the way, lets get to two more sensible (though slightly boring) theories. One has to do with the fact that the curtains on the side of the stage that help hide the backstage area from the audience are called "legs." The theory is that the stage manager used to tell the actors to go onstage by telling them to break through one of the legs. The other theory has to do with bowing. According to the theory, bowing comes from when audiences used to throw money onto the stage at the end of a play to show their appreciation and actors would bend down to pick up the money. They would sometimes have to bend their knees (or break their leg lines) to get all the money. So you're wishing that the audience gives you a lot of money.
The last two are very believable, but they're not the one that makes the most sense to me. My favorite theory is that the phrase came from a German phrase, "Hals- und Beinbruch," which is used to wish people luck, but is literally translated as, "neck and leg fracture." Allegedly this phrase is a parody of the Yiddish phrase "Hatsloche un Broche," which translates as "Success and blessing." This theory fits the timeline perfectly as there were a lot of German immigrants, particularly Jewish German immigrants, who became involved in the theatre.
Now that I have spent several paragraphs hammering you with theories about where, "Break a leg!" came from, lets talk briefly about other superstitions. One that actors tend to take even more seriously than not saying, "Good luck," is that you never mention the name of the Scottish Play, that is to say Macbeth. On the British TV show Blackadder II, there was a scene where two actors were compelled to recite, "Hot potato, audience roars, puck will make amends," and then tweak each others noses every time someone said Macbeth.
In reality, the rituals are left up to the person who said it. The most common are that the person who said it has to spin around as fast as they can three times and then spit (I actually witnessed someone forcing someone else to do this because they said Macbeth), or that the person who said it is locked out of the theatre and made to run around the building three times and then swear before they are let back inside. There doesn't seem to be any debate as to why you can't say Macbeth, everything I've heard boils down to the play being cursed because of the witchcraft portrayed in it.
Other common superstitions are that you can't whistle backstage (this goes back to when former sailors were stage hands and they would use a series of whistles to communicate when to pull the ropes, actors whistling backstage would cause a stage hand to pull the wrong rope at the wrong time), stories of ghosts of actors haunting theatres, having lucky articles of clothing that they always wear during performances or auditions, or pre-show rituals that they must perform.
I knew someone who had a pre-show ritual where they, and another person, would each take a red vine, do a song and dance incorperating the red vine, drink ginger ale out of a bottle cap through the red vine, stick one end of the red vine in their nose, then eating the red vine. He had to do this before EVERY performance. There were other parts of the ritual that I don't remember exactly, every thing he said was very specific.
All this having been said, I am not superstitious. In fact my friend, Brandon Rogers, and I used to say to each other, "Good Luck, Macbeth!" before every performance. Ironically this became a ritual in and of itself. Brandon sadly passed away several years ago, and still, in his honor, I will think "Good Luck, Macbeth!" before every performance I do.
Oh and 100 big, fat points to the first person to identify what the title of this post is referencing.
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