AUSTRALIA

A hungry rat has been blamed for a power failure during a ballet in Australia. Dancers and audience members were plunged into darkness during the second half of a Sleeping Beauty performance by the Australian Ballet. About 2,000 patrons had to be evacuated by torchlight from the theatre in Adelaide after realising the outage was not an artistic effect. State energy authorities later confirmed rodent damage as the cause. “[Crews] found a rat that crawled inside one of our 11,000-volt pieces of equipment and had blown a fuse,” a spokeswoman from South Australia Power Network said.