Standing tall on the oceanfront, with surf life savers as our princes and the historic building itself as our castle, we knew that Sydney’s iconic Bondi Pavilion would be the perfect setting for Cinderella, Belle, Jasmine, Snow White, Aurora and (especially) Ariel to perform Princess Cabaret‘s Edinburgh fundraiser shows.

Or so it seemed, until an earthquake in New Zealand meant that a tsunami alert was issued for Sydney’s coastline – just before our show time. When both TV and internet tell you to “get away from the sea”, an oceanfront location that’s fit for a princess suddenly seems more like the evil queen’s pool party.

Sure, Tinkerbell was able to fly away, and Ariel was excited about showing everyone her natural habitat up close, but the landlubbers known as our audience were somewhat less safe and enthused. It was time to evacuate.

As The Sydney Morning Herald would have it, we promptly ‘ejected’ our patrons from the beachside venue. We enjoy this image, even if it is less storybook and more Toy Story.

For what it would be worth in the event of megatonnes of water descending on our theatre, we locked up our tech equipment and snack-bar before we scarpered to higher ground. Unfortunately for our fundraising, though, we had to give back quite a bit of money. But on the plus side, we wouldn’t have to stand around feeding a surplus of soggy chips to the seagulls. And we’re, like, alive and stuff.

We piled into cars and zoomed away from the Pacific Ocean, still reeling from performus interruptus – feeling a mix of “What just happened there?” and ultimately relief that, were a disaster to occur, at least we would live to do our show far, far away in Edinburgh (our relief still stands, despite some weather nerd claiming we overreacted).

That said, our hastily abandoned props and costumes would be somewhere deep in Davy Jones’ Locker, with only two weeks to remake them. Sure, it’d take a lot longer to rebuild our beautiful city (less funny), but we’re all about the Fringe right now and we promise we would’ve helped in September.

But happily for Sydney, as our accidental foray into international news points out, the not-quite-tsunami had but one ‘casualty’: the evening’s performance of Princess Cabaret.