Community Theater - good, bad, and everything in between

Accents drive me nuts in community theater productions.

-Bad accents- if you can’t do a convincing accent, don’t do an accent

-Speaking of accents- speak in them consistently. If a character is speaking with a Cockney accent, it shouldn’t come and go.

-If it’s not modern it must be English: I’ve seen productions of Medea, Les Mis (the concert that’s licensed now, The Crucible and other plays in which the cast went for an English accent for no apparent reason. While I understand not wanting to speak in a thick Arkansas drawl, it’s no more off-putting than a phony Brit accent.

-Don’t overestimate your abilities in plays where accents are important. DO NOT EVEN ATTEMPT the show MY FAIR LADY unless you can pull off the distinct and very important accents. Ditto OLIVER. I’ve seen both slaughtered.
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That said, I’ve seen some really great work come out of Community Theaters. The worst problems tend to arise when the director wants to be too ambitious; musicals and light comedies set in America tend to work best. Few things are worse than a failed drama. (One of the most bizarre community theater shows I ever saw was a dinner theater production of Shadowlands, the play about C.S. Lewis’s wife dying of cancer— you’ll come for the apple pie and cancer but you’ll stay for the chops and Christian apologetics!)

What’s really bad is when you have about two or three great performances and then one or two that are so bad they bring the others down around them. However, I’ve seen that happen in professional theater as well.

[QUOTE=FairyChatMom]
(Not gonna rant about the old days when we were taught to project to the back row and didn’t use mics…)
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Rant away. Irks me so much I once started a thread about it; particularly irks me in professional productions.

I run the concession stand at the local theatre sometimes because they contribute to our local food pantry. If I NEVER see “The Importance Of Being Ernest”, “The Odd Couple” or “Twelve Angry Men” again it’ll be too soon. You know how stale the theatre scene is when you find “You’re A Good man, Charlie Brown” a refreshing change of pace. My ghod, that was old when I was in grade school!

Several times, I’ve done crew work for community theater. There was one that was fraught with problems from day one (among other things, we had an actress go berserk offstage during a performance, and she was canned on the spot) and we had one actor who was a real a$$hat and totally dropped the ball WRT promotion, which he was also supposed to do. One of the “other things” was that we got sign language interpreters for a couple of performances, and he refused to promote this. Good heavens, had the Deaf community known, we could have sold out those performances. :mad:

The previous year, this same troupe did “The Nerd”, and at one dress rehearsal, I laughed so hard, my ribs hurt the next day. Another local troupe did the same play last year, and I enjoyed it this time too.

I have a friend who recounts a time in community theatre where they were putting on a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and one of the actors missed his cue to come on.

After vamping (and vamping pretty quick-fire patter, too) for 25 minutes, the ambulance guys coming through the stage door let them know that the cast member that they were waiting for had had a heart attack backstage.

Unexpected interval, the director togaed up in the place of the Cardiac Kid and they kicked off again after the break.

A few years back, my wife And I wen to see “Jesus Christ Superstar” at a tiny community theater here in Columbia MO. There are several good theaters here, but this wasn’t one of them. I grade community theater on a generous curve, but the acting was terrible… Except for the guy who played Jesus. That guy was freakin awesome, the best Jesus I’ve ever seen in JCS. Great acting, great singing. I hope he went on to better things.

I had an epiphany a few years ago.

Professional theater: the actors are there for the sake of the audience.
Community theater: the audience is there for the sake of the actors.

That’s not always true, of course–there’s some community theater so good that it’s worth going to for its own sake–but it seems to hold true as a general rule. As such, I’ll happily go to community theater productions in which I know one of the actors or have some other community tie, but otherwise I’m not particularly interested.

We’ve had ups and downs. I’ve seen some fantastic productions at local theaters (August, Osage County was so good, and so bleak, and right before the holidays, that the whole line in the ladies’ room at intermission was silent until somebody said "Well I’m glad we’re having a SMALL Thanksgiving this year!) and some really shitty ones. We also have a university here, and those productions vary like hell - I laughed harder at their Noises Off than I’ve ever laughed at a play, and then we just went to see their Lear recently and oh my god I was so fucking ready to kill that Fool myself. Hang it! HANG IT. But the rest of the cast was fantastic.

So you never know. I keep meaning to get seasons’ tickets for us to force us to go see more things, because they really are usually quite good. As it is we never end up going.

Ha! I’ve been there! With my parents and their beach house development friends, all of whom were ancient - I bet I was the youngest person there by twenty years. It was Love, Sex, and the IRS, which wasn’t awesome or anything but at least it was energetic and the audience ate it up.

**Zsofia **- it’s been close to 20 years since I went to the Alhambra, maybe longer. I was looking at their show history - yep, it’s been a while.

We once went to a community “dinner theater” - it was done at the Lion’s Club, and dinner was served on foam plates with plastic flatware. I’m pretty sure it was just something from Stouffer’s that was warmed up and dished out. We’d have done better to just go for the show, even tho it was pretty awful, too. Or maybe it’s just that I thought The Fantasticks was a dumb show. For all that people raved about it for years, I found it boring and mostly bad. And I don’t think it was all the fault of the theater group.

I’ve known race to be an issue in community and college production. Personally I consider casting a role traditionally played by an actor of a particular race with an actor of another race a “value neutral” thing in most cases; I’ve seen Harold Hill portrayed by a sexy Asian guy and Sky Masterson played by black men in a couple of productions and all of them good. I saw a very good production of Jesus Christ Superstar once in which Jesus and the Apostles (including Judas) were played by black actors while Pilate and Roman soldiers were played by white actors (even though Herod is actually a Jew, but I understand the choice) and Herod Antipas was played by a black actor who talked in an affected English accent (I guess they were going for “whitest accent possible”, which was ironic since I saw it with a black lady who was English). The recent all black TV movie of Steel Magnolias was in some ways better than the original (particularly Phyllicia Rashad over Olympia Dukakis and Rashad’s real life daughter over Julia Roberts- Shirley MacLaine still rules Ouiser.)

The exception to the racially integrated productions being value neutral, though, are when the character’s race is important, and there I’ll admit it IS distracting. I saw a college production of one of my favorite plays, Ragtime, in which Younger Brother, Emma Goldman, and Tateh’s daughter were played by a black actors; they were all decent actors, but because the play deals specifically with racial prejudice at the turn in turn of the century NYC and suburbs it took me out of the play. Another time was West Side Story when Maria was Asian and the actor playing her brother was black; I don’t think it would have been as much of an issue if both had been Asian or both had been black, but since the play is about “us v. them” it didn’t work. I realize that the directors may have been trying to make a statement about the silliness of racial distinctions and all but, to me, but, not all statements are equally effective.

A black Scrooge or Mama Rose or Alfred Doolittle, no problem; I think Broadway’s long overdue for a black Jean Valjean. A black Tevye can work, because even though he’s a Russian Jew, such is the universal nature of the play that it’s no more vital for suspension of disbelief that he be played by a white actor anymore than by a Jewish actor (though Alfred Molina did get some grief for playing him). However, a white Othello or all-white MISS SAIGON (it’s been done- look on YouTube at some of the high school productions) or a black Edward Rutledge or an Asian MLK are all, imho, too jarring and “gimmicky” to suspend disbelief because the races of those characters are vital if you don’t want to border on absurdism.

The weirdest college theater production I ever heard of- and I didn’t see it but wish I had- was a dual production of Driving Miss Daisy in Georgia in the late '90s. On some nights they had an all white cast, and on other nights it was an all black cast. They used the same sets and same director. (I don’t know if the white Hoke did a “yas’m, we’s gwine to the store” accent or not- since it was at a predominantly black college I think it would have been a controversial choice, but otoh it would be odd to hear “I desire to translate madame to the Piggly Wiggly”.) I remember thinking it would make more sense to do a flipped race version- white Hoke, black Daisy, than to do the “segregated” version, but, I think the director was trying to make a point about segregation. Probably that it was bad or something.

Not related to race, but setting can get really loopy when a director has a vision. There’s a fine line between innovative and silly. In movie versions of Shakespeare, for instance, Richard III in a fascist 1930s setting was innovative; Love’s Labors Lost as a Busby Berkley-esque musical comedy didn’t, and Baz Luhrman’s Miami set Romeo & Juliet was wildly mixed. In live amateur productions, Pippin in a junkyard did not work for me, but Merry Wives of Windsor in a cartoonish old west did.

Sigh. You’ve done it now. I bought us a ticket package that we will damned well use up, come hell or high water. And we’re going to see some new show. Premiere of a new play. Could be AWFUL. I’ll blame you.

I guess I’m not sure, really, what “community theater” is. Anything that isn’t a traveling production? Does it have to have local children in it playing small animals? If some of the actors are paid and some aren’t, is it still community theater? The way I’m taking the term I’m figuring it’s anything we got in Columbia, South Carolina that ain’t some fancy-ass traveling Broadway show. But is some of that actually professional theater and I’m just being snitty about it?

My definition is amateur theater, usually unpaid (other than perhaps an honorarium to help with costume rental or gas, which I’ve known a few to do), though I do lump in college theater since they often have community members who are active as well.

The M-I-L is very active on the board of their small town Colorado community theater and even writes plays every year or so that are put on usually around Thanksgiving or Christmas. They’ll sell out each weekend performance for a couple of weeks. Honestly, they’re some of the more enjoyable plays I’ve ever seen and the cast and crew alike are so pleasant to work with, you really do feel like you’ve stepped back in time to a kinder, more caring time.

Weird but I mentioned this to a co-worker I’d just met in a class a couple of weeks ago and he said his family was going to a very well-regarded theater in Colorado this summer. Lo and behold it turned out they’re one and the same.

Oh, hai. I was Auntie Em in The Wiz. Not the Wizard of Oz, but The Wiz. Not a white person in the production (high school, but I came from a high budget GOOD high school theater). We were all pretty mortified. To this day, I’m not sure what possessed our director to chose that show. All she’d say on the topic was, “The Wiz isn’t the **black **Wizard of Oz, it’s the **urban **Wizard of Oz.” Which, uh, sure, whatever, but we’re a bunch of white suburban kids! What the hell do we know of “urban”?!

And, no, I did not drop the “d” off my lines. I didn’t use overarticulated pronunciation, but ain’t no way in HELL this white girl is singing “Put yo’ arm around me, chile,” 20 miles from the Gary border.

In general, community theater mean the plays are performed by amateurs (i.e., nonmembers of the SAG, though occasionally the top-level ones will use one or two SAG performers). No one is paid.

College theater is the same, only performed on college campuses. It usually is slightly more experimental in nature, since it doesn’t have to attract an audience.

There’s also high school plays. We were lucky because we had a very talented director who for many years did some first-class productions including some nice versions of My Fair Lady, Annie Get Your Gun and others, but as time went on, she sort of lost it (she was in her 70s). She did a version of George M in 2012 that was a mess, as she added a section in the middle supposedly set in present-day NYC as some sort of remembrance on 9/11; it was long and muddled.

Actually, all her productions ran very long since she insisted on full set changes after every scene. So everything would stop for five minutes as the reset the scenery, performed a five-minute scene, then reset it again for five minutes. The results were often worth the wait, but as she started to decline, they got longer and the results were less impressive.

I’ve been to a lot of shows on both the West End and Broadway, and still one of my best theater-going experiences was a little college group’s performance of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged.” I think it was put on in a spare classroom, they were all amateurs, and they had no budget - but somehow it just clicked wonderfully.

That one was exceptionally good, but by and large I’ve enjoyed my community theater-going experiences. I’ve seen good high school plays that I’ve enjoyed as much as some professional stuff in London and New York. Maybe I’m grading on a different curve, or maybe it comes down to the material. I thought “Next to Normal” on Broadway was pretty awful; I’d rather watch amateurs perform good material than professionals perform bad material.

Also, I’m surprised no one’s mentioned Waiting for Guffman. Classic movie that skewers community theater.

[QUOTE=WhyNot]
And, no, I did not drop the “d” off my lines. I didn’t use overarticulated pronunciation, but ain’t no way in HELL this white girl is singing “Put yo’ arm around me, chile,” 20 miles from the Gary border.
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The maddest I’ve ever gotten about “racial profiling in casting” was when I played Mr. Kirby- a staid uptight Mr. Drysdale sort of banker- in a production of You Can’t Take It With You. The play was written in the '30s and has a lot of attitudes from that era.
There was a black theater student, Desiree, who auditioned and was asked to read for the part of the maid, Reba, who has such lines as “Oh Lawd have mercy, dey’s flies in da kitchen!” and “Donald done brought some pickled pigs feets!”. After a couple of dialect free “There are flies in the kitchen” readings the director (a white liberal midwesterner, incidentally, though “of a certain age”) said “Do it more… uh… eh… you know… ah… period… comedic”.

Desiree gave a reading you’d have heard at the '30s casting call, proving she could do it as Hattie McDaniel as you’d like, but then said “Hell will freeze before I do it like that on stage in front of an audience.” When told “Hattie McDaniel was a great actress, and she played roles like that”, Desiree responded “Hattie McDaniel got paid a lot of money; you want to pay me a few thousand dollars, I’ll 'dey’s flies in da kitchen!” all day long."

I begged for the director to cast her as my wife- a Harriet Drysdale sort- because she had great timing and there’s a scene where Mr. and Mrs. Kirby play a word association game that can be hysterical but ONLY IF the timing is right. Instead the role went to a 19 year old student (white) who was supposed to be playing a 50 year old woman but would not do any kind of age make-up (I was in my late 30s but grayed my hair for the part and added some lines to my face each night, so she looked like my child bride) and who had the comedic timing of Helen Keller and recited her lines like she was reading. Desiree would have freaking KILLED with that scene. (The maid was played by a white student, who for no apparent reason decided to go Irish.) The director gave some “I wanted to give a chance to somebody who hasn’t been cast before” excuse, but puh-leez.

Epilogue: I’m still friends with Desiree- we haven’t seen each other in years but talk all the time on Facebook- and she was actually cast in an Atlanta based TV show as a single mother and drug addict but fired because… she wasn’t ghetto enough. Because, you know, black single mothers and drug addicts are all ghetto and one-dimensional, without exception.

Coincidentally enough, I went to a performance of Tommy here in Olympia two weeks ago. It was put on by a youth program that works with kids from the local schools and had an all-teenage cast (the lead actor was 15) with the adults playing the instruments and handling the lighting. It was a great performance, in a tiny little theater where I sat in the front row and had to tuck my legs in for fear of accidentally tripping the actors, and I’d be surprised if some of these kids don’t go on to big things.