Jesus on High: When You Accidentally Eat Hash Cookies Before Going on Stage

By Kristian Lavercombe, as told to Frances Morton.

In the lead up to WEED WEEK on VICELAND (April 17-23, from 6PM) we're running a series of stories on New Zealand's most widely-used illegal drug.

There aren't many jobs where on your first day, you have people out there who will write about how good or bad you are in a newspaper or on the internet.

On that opening night at Q Theatre in Auckland, I absolutely wanted it to be perfect. It was going to be an audience full of reviewers and theatre people and celebrities. You want it to be good.

As an actor who sings, I have a set routine that I go through the majority of the season. You really have to look after yourself because you don't want to get out there and let all your hard work goes to waste. It's a bit like being an athlete, if you're going to run a marathon or something like that you wouldn't be out drinking the night before. Which is why what happened on opening night was my worst nightmare.

I got to the theatre a good two and a half hours beforehand. I think I was the first there because I just wanted to make sure I was prepared. I was in my costume. We played Jesus as a rock star so I had a suitable greasy quiff going on. It was probably about an hour before the show started and one of the actors came in. It's an opening night tradition. You give each other gifts and you get cards and a box of chocolates. It's a sharing caring environment.

So one of the actors came in and he had this clear plastic box of cookies, and he just gave them to me and I went, "Oh thank you that's really kind. How amazing" and he didn't say anything. Then I offered them around to everybody and nobody took any of them. At times during the show Jesus has to wear fairly skimpy clothing, and because of that I'd been going to the gym and I'd cut sugar out of my diet. There was a little note on the cookie box that said "Give to Kristian on opening night" and it said in little, tiny writing along the bottom "one per hour" and I thought, "Oh that's really kind of them, because I hadn't had sugar in such a long time that if I have too many cookies the sugar is going to affect me." But because I am a complete sugar fiend, I had a couple of these cookies.

About 25 minutes after that, I was doing my warm up and half way through I was like "Oh my god, I am so nervous. I am so nervous I can't feel my hands. My goodness, I'm getting more nervous.. I can't feel my legs". I started walking back down to my dressing room and I was like, "Oh my god, I am so nervous I feel like I'm stoned!" And then as I carried on walking I thought, "Oh my god what have I eaten?" I sprinted—as well as I could—back to the dressing room and said, "Where did those biscuits come from?" The guy goes, "Oh I don't know, it just said give to Kristian" and I was like, "I think, they're marijuana cookies, they're laced with marijuana," and he was like, "Don't be stupid." But I just kept getting more stoned and more stoned so I went straight to the stage manager—and this is probably a stage manager's worst nightmare on opening night—and was like, "Okay, um, I, um I've eaten these biscuits, they're definitely laced with marijuana."

I said, "I can tell you I'm the kind of person, if I had just one puff of a joint at a party, I'd be in the corner not being able to speak on my hands and knees. I'm a complete lightweight when it comes to anything like this. I haven't even drunk alcohol in the last four months."

You could suddenly see all the cogs going round in her head, because it's a big show. That poor woman had to deal with it.

She put me in a room by myself because I think she thought, 'Okay, if he gets more fucked it's going to really worry the other cast members, because it's their opening night as well and this is the guy who's meant to be running the whole show.' Suddenly lots of people started coming into the room to try and help me, like Madeleine Sami was there with her laptop looking up "cures for stoned-ness". Laughton Kora was there as well. They were like, "I know how to solve this." They were feeding me orange juice, coffee and food and I was just getting more and more stoned. I'd lost all track of time by this stage, they left me by myself again and then important people started coming in like [Auckland Theatre Company artistic director] Colin McColl.

It was half an hour after the show was meant to start so the audience knows something is wrong, obviously they don't know what the actual story is, but they can see people whispering in the ears of Colin McColl and the director Oliver Driver and the shock on their faces and they suddenly get up and run out of the theatre. They were coming into the room and I didn't know if they knew and because I was really stoned and really paranoid I was trying to cover the fact, so they were like, "How are you?" and I was like, "Yeah no I'm good, yup, looking forward to opening night, yip." It was awful, it was so uncomfortable.

Because it's opening night, I didn't have an understudy. The stage manager came in and was like, "Okay we've got two choices here, we can either cancel the show or you go out and do the show." I was really stoned trying to make decisions.

At this point, my voice had dropped by about an octave. I couldn't even actually talk and it's such a huge sing. So Oliver Driver comes in and, because we're playing Jesus Christ as a rock star, Oliver Driver was really amazing about it and he was like, "Okay now, obviously it's up to you, but you can either cancel the show and if you have to do that, that's absolutely fine, we understand…. or cause we're playing Jesus as a rock star (Jesus was wearing a death metal band t-shirt and his first entrance he comes on with a bottle of scotch) he's like 'Why don't you just play him like a drug fucked rock star?"

I don't even know if I can remember what the show's about at this point. And I was like, okay, my brain just cannot handle the fact of cancelling it and making all those people go home. I just don't think I ever, in my entire life, would have lived that down or handled the responsibility of that. It was all surreal, it was like some movie unfolding. So yeah, I agreed to do the show.

I made my first entrance not knowing whether I was going off some kind of cliff, and oddly the show was nothing like I'd rehearsed it. That first scene, where Jesus is slightly drunk anyway, I could just hear a very clear Oliver Driver laugh coming over the top of the audience as he understood that this Jesus was really, really drug fucked.

I was shocked the songs came out fine, because before I went on I couldn't speak. There was one moment there when all the cast were on stage in a nightclub scene, and I remember standing there thinking "wow, this night club's really awesome" then realising I was in a show.

I didn't actually know which other actors knew. I knew Madeleine Sami, Julia Deans and Laughton Kora knew. I think someone told me that I had to let everybody I was working with directly know because if I went out there and did something really strange, they're going to go, what on earth is wrong. So I made sure they knew, and they were really great about it. They're all rock stars themselves and have got great musical careers and don't come from a theatre environment. They come from a gigging band environment where it's quite normal for people to be a bit trashed. They were so giving. Laughton is the most fabulously generous person and he had a couple of shots—he probably wouldn't mind me saying this—before he went on stage to make sure that we were on the same level.

Afterwards there were some very, very relieved people from the Auckland Theatre Company. Their main concern didn't seem to be with the show at the time, it was if I was going to be safe out there or not. They put me through all these kind of tests before the show and then at half time just to make sure that I was going to be capable of doing what I had to be doing.

Even though it's a little bit hush, hush, news just spread like wildfire. It's my understanding that even Andrew Lloyd Webber, the writer of Jesus Christ Superstar had heard about it, I think the story of a stoned Jesus on opening night—it's going to spread.

It turned out that I bumped into somebody on the street who I'd known years before and I was telling him that when I do a show I've got to look after my voice so I don't drink and I don't really go out. So he just got the wrong end of the stick and thought, oh poor guy, I know what I'll do I'll send him some cookies.

I've stayed away from weed since then, funnily enough. You know, what's the point unless you can do it in front of hundreds of people? If you want get a buzz then you should get stoned and try and do a musical in front of hundreds of people, that's living in the edge.

It's all fine in retrospect, but I don't know if I'd have so many generous thoughts about it, or so many funny thoughts, if it had gone badly. Everybody involved was innocent including myself and that's why it's okay to tell I think. No actual harm was meant to be done by anybody and everybody handled the situation impeccably so yeah it's fine. It's become a little bit of folk lore now.

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