On Saturday night, a blackout darkened Manhattan's West Side for several hours. But that didn't stop cast members from several Broadway shows, and Carnegie Hall, from performing. Not in their scheduled stage performances but impromptu ones outside on the sidewalks.

The New York Times:

The electricity failed about an hour before curtain for most shows, meaning the casts and crew were already in place and audiences were on their way.

Some lucky patrons were treated to brief sidewalk songs while producers tried to figure out whether the lights might return in time to salvage Saturday night — generally the most lucrative night of the week for Broadway.

The shows got canceled, but "the show must go on," as they say:

When the NYC #blackout hit the Walter Kerr tonight, André and the company had to take this party to the streets! (?: @misskimizzo) #Hadestown #Broadway pic.twitter.com/oZTW3gaimm

— Hadestown (@hadestown) July 14, 2019

Impromptu performance #broadwayblackout @wecomefromaway pic.twitter.com/PfHYZeFJ6v

— Chad Kimball (@chadkimball1) July 14, 2019

The cast of @WaitressMusical entertaining stalled theatergoers outside during the NYC blackout. (via @meganrgaffney) #Blackout #NYCBlackout pic.twitter.com/vLLnAcKV8D

— Dave Quinn (@NineDaves) July 14, 2019

I guess this is what they call a New York moment. After being trapped on the F for an hour because of the power outage I emerged to see dark restaurants & traffic lights, civilians directing traffic, & an evacuated Carnegie Hall concert happening in the street. #nyc #Blackout pic.twitter.com/3p9UWtRrel

— Briallen Hopper (@briallenhopper) July 14, 2019

How @RockOfAges handled the #NYCblackout, tonight!

Sanders won an unprecedented six out of seven primaries in a streak that culminated with astounding, lopsided victories on Saturday night. MSNBC "covered" it by airing a couple of reality TV shows about life in prison, while CNN preferred to cover some breaking news about Jesus, who has been dead for at least 2,000 years, and who would have felt the Bern anyway. Read the rest

On November 9, 1965, a massive blackout impacted more than 30 million people over 80,000 square miles in the Northeast United States and parts of Canada. This is a live recording of the weirdness that Dan Ingram, a DJ on NYC radio station 77 WABC, experienced as the voltage drop slowly wreaked havoc on the audio system. From Wikipedia:

An aircheck of New York City radio station WABC from November 9, 1965 reveals disc jockey Dan Ingram doing a segment of his afternoon drive time show, during which he notes that a record he's playing (Jonathan King's "Everyone's Gone to the Moon") sounds slow, as do the subsequent jingles played during a commercial break. Ingram quipped that the King record "was in the key of R." The station's music playback equipment used motors that got their speed timing from the frequency of the powerline, normally 60 Hz. Comparisons of segments of the hit songs played at the time of the broadcast, minutes before the blackout happened, in this aircheck, as compared to the same song recordings played at normal speed reveal that approximately six minutes before blackout the line frequency was 56 Hz, and just two minutes before the blackout that frequency dropped to 51 Hz. As Si Zentner's recording of "(Up a) Lazy River" plays in the background – again at a slower-than-normal tempo – Ingram mentions that the lights in the studio are dimming, then suggests that the electricity itself is slowing down, adding, "I didn't know that could happen".