This is why I love live theatre.

In the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre's production of Ken Ludwig's Lend Me a Tenor, Will Morgan plays Tito Merelli, an egocentric and wildly passionate Italian opera star. Late in Act I, the character discovers that his equally tempestuous wife is leaving him. Merelli subsequently launches into a fit of hysterically inconsolable grief, and on Thursday night, Morgan wailed and moaned with peerless comic abandon.

Yet at the very moment the actor began his tirade, there was an enormous thunderclap, and the evening's rainstorm - which had been percolating for an hour - significantly grew in intensity. For three minutes, the squall outside seemed to echo the personal tsunami that Morgan was enacting on-stage, until finally, with Joshua Estrada's hapless nebbish Max calming him, Morgan's Merelli collapsed on the bed, devastated and exhausted.

And outside, as if on cue, the storm began to subside.