Not quite an equipment failure…much worse…
Was touring Europe with a musical and caught the flu. Passed out ONSTAGE during the performance. (The band was on a moving band car that would travel downstage and upstage.) Woke up in the emergency room and ended up having missed two shows.
Felt horrible about what happened because the band had a huge rock number in which we all took pre-set 16 bar solos. Because I passed out in the middle of the act, 10 minutes before we were to play this number, the band had to improvise at that moment. To this day I never found out who took over my 16 bars or if they just frantically sent panicked eye signals to each other to cover, as the music was non stop thru out the performance.
Hard lesson learned; take better care of yourself and have a contingency plan for such emergencies. None of us prepared for something like this and we should have known better because the cast had gotten colds since first setting foot in Germany and the understudies were overworked the first two weeks we were there. Yikes!