What is the worst stage production you have ever seen?

Cafe Society
1

It can be performance art, Broadway, classic show or original piece- anything.

My votes:

-a college production of Driving Miss Daisy in which the cast was not only all black but (with the exception of Hoke) uniquely untalented. While in most cases (especially in non-professional productions) integrating the cast not only does not hurt the production but is only fair, race is pretty central to this play’s plot. (The director was trying to make a point about “we’re all the same” and perhaps with a decent cast it would have worked, but even so… it didn’t.)

-a non-equity professional road show of the revamped Cabaret in which Sally Bowles was played by an actress (she has a web-site but I won’t link) who needs to be working at Waffle House (no charisma, a so-so voice [Sally is not supposed to be a great singer but this woman abused the privilege] and a Herr Schulz who I am convinced was really the theater janitor who was given a script and thrown on-stage when the real actor was run over by a Brinks truck five minutes before curtain (he couldn’t sing, he couldn’t act, and he forgot his line at least twice- and this was a professional production). The emcee (Christopher Sloan) was outstanding as was Frau Schneider, but they were the only more-than-mediocre performances.

-a college “world premiere” production called “Dog Island” set in a post-nuclear apocalypse America. It was also hopefully the last production. There were numerous attempts to shock (three teenaged males in g-strings and croker-sacks played a father, mother and son) with references to cannibalism and bashes at American culture and politics (the playwright was a Vietnam era export to Canada and his very anti-American politics were showcased throughout). Total dreck (and that’s not because I disagreed with political views- it just sucked in general.)

-a touring company of OLIVER that was just absolutely attrocious. Fagin was way too young and spoke in a Borsch Belt Yiddish accent, Oliver’s voice was changing ala Peter Brady, and the rest of the cast seemed to be waiting for their cell phone to bring them a dog food commercial from their agent that would get them the hell out of here.

2

Fiddler on the Roof.

The bottles were velcroed on, but they still fell off.

3

I saw an attrocious production of “Medea” at a prestigious all-women’s college that shall remain nameless. Is there a good adjective, analagous to “coyote ugly”, that can be applied to such a train-wreck, a production that makes you want to chew your arm off if it can get you out of your seat before intermission? It appeared that the only direction the poor women on stage were given was “wail and flail”. “Jason” simply couldn’t pull it off as a pants role; and “Medea” made me wish she’d flee to Media after the first scene. It’s an agonizing story, but to render the subject matter with such horrifically amateurish execution put it over the top from “tragedy” to “travesty”. I’ve seen small-town high schools do better with equally heavy material. Excruciating, through and through.

4

A version of The Country Wife that I had the misfortune of being the assistant stage manager of. Sure, it was community theatre, in a small town in Nova Scotia, but that’s simply not enough of an excuse.
For some reason the entire budget was spent on renting costumes from some opera house in Toronto - never did figure out why.
The main character was the town’s wife-beating mayor, who never actually learned his lines.
This led to some fascinating improv as the other actors stuggled to figure out which page he was actually on, and then find some way of incorporating all the critical bits from the dialogue he’d skipped.

or…and I’m really not sure which was worse…Juno and the Paycock done by the same theatre the following year. It’s an awful play to begin with, and this time the budget had been spent on a professional actor. I think they really needed to ask themselves why he was willing to do this. Fought with the entire cast, and was generally unpleasant and horrible. However, that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that the artistic director of the theatre was so completely useless that she simply watched the movie, and then re-created it. Not surprisingly, this failed miserably.
Oh yeah - and I stage managed this one.

Maybe it’s me.

5

A production of Julius Ceasar at our region’s Kennedy Center American College Theatre festival. The original production may have been good, but it had been almost a year since it had closed, and most of teh cast had graduared, or was otherwise not available. Truly, a horrendous production. It was so bad, that faculty from other colleges were openly mocking it DURING the performance.

A Professional production of “The Nutcracker”. The dancing wasn’t TOO bad, but during the ‘Dance of the Snowflakes’ there was a SLIGHT technical glitch. Whoever loaded the snow into the snowsling didn’t bother actually taking the snow out of the bags. So in the middle of the dance, about ten full bags of snow came crashing down among the dancers. Luckily no one was hurt.

6

A pre-Broadway tryout of a play starring Carol Channing and Mary Martin – so bad, I can’t remember the name anymore. These two great stars had to have a combined age of about 160 years old between them at the time. The script was horrible, the production half-hearted, and except for one tiny little piece of stage business by Mary Martin when she was apparently feeling bored, the cast was just phoning it in.

Funny thing is, that one tiny little piece of stage business by Mary Martin convinced me what a good time I could have had if anything else had been up to that level.

No, the play never made it to New York.

7

Every summer, there’s a musical staged here in Austin’s Zilker Park, and it’s almost always a superb production.

But a few years back, for some reason, they chose to do “The Will Rogers Follies,” which is a pretty weak show to begin with (there’s a not a single memorable song). And worse still, the star couldn’t do even the most rudimentary lasso tricks! It was painful to watch this guy try to crack jokes while he feebly twirled his rope.

8

Hmm. Well, I saw Candide in London in six or seven years ago. It was incredibly long and just plain terrible. I guess it was actually a late preview, since I remember people trying to guess what else would be cut before the show opened. I was there with a number of students and, among others, our 50-year-old English teacher, who was a huge theatre buff. He called it the worst show he’d ever seen.

My other nominee would be the version of Tartuffe that I saw on Broadway two years ago. That was absolutely painful. The acting wasn’t so hot, but the real problem was the verse itself. (And yes, I knew Moliere. In retrospect I realized I should’ve seen this trainwreck coming.) Within a few minutes, my mother and I were leaning in to each other and guessing how each line was going to end. We did pretty well at it, which was cracking us up. But it was still a painful experience. After a discussion lasting the final few minutes of the first act, we left at intermission. It’s the only play either of us have ever walked out on - on Broadway no less - and I don’t expect anything to share that distinction any time soon. Perhaps you think I just hate Moliere, and maybe I do. But the play only lasted six weeks and was in previews for nearly as long, so I’m guessing our reaction was not unique.

9

I saw a terrible performance of *Pirates of Penzance * a few years ago at a local school (which should have been able to do much, much better). The director was clearly uncertain about the approach - would it be a traditional G&S version, or a more jazzy, updated version? Unfortunately it ended up being a mishmash of both and a complete failure.

10

Hands down,
Dracula on Broadway was the worst show I’ve ever paid to attend. For various reasons. I would’ve expected more from Frank Wildhorn.

11

Well, not counting middle and high school plays the most recent (and easily remembered disappointment), is the musical version of Once Were Warriors.

From what I understand, it was based on a great movie, (that “everyone” knows)which was based on a great book (that “everyone” also knows). But I’d never seen either the movie or the book. So I didn’t know the characters. Or the plot. Or anything about what I was going to see - and I really needed that background because it was horribly miscast, not that any of the actors were especially bad. But they didn’t belong together. The actress playing the thirteen-year-old daughter and the actress playing the 40-year-old mom looked like unrelated twenty-somethings. It took a quarter of the play for me to figure out that they were mother and daughter and another half the play before I figured out the daughter hadn’t hit twenty yet. I didn’t find out 13 until I read a review later that evening - seeing there’s a major plot point around the fact that she is a child, large parts of the play made no sense.

Plus, the dialogue was horrible, the songs were just plain bad, neither the author or director had any use for subtlety, and while there were great dancers doing really good choreography, it didn’t belong (yes, in musicals, people break out into spontaneous dancing. But usually, you at least costume them so they have some reason for being on stage at that time. There were a lot of “Isn’t he _____? Shouldn’t he be in another city right now? Wow, he really nailed that jump.” moments.)

12

Our local high school theater program has been directed by one woman for many years. In the early years, her staging and shows were just plain spectacular (I remember a version of My Fair Lady that was at near professional level). However, as time went on, she seemed to lose it. In 2002, she decided to to George M. Now, she has a reputation for mixing scenes around, taking parts from the movie version and adding it to the script, etc. Often it worked, but in this case, she put the finale in the middle of the play. And set it in the present day.

What little narrative the play had (and there isn’t much), was completely dissipated, the change was confusing, and it left the play with no finale.

13

Not a play I saw, but a play a friend of a friend of mine was an actor in.

The play was a stage version of Dracula, and for most of the run it was just fine. They even had a great opening scene- the narrator would read the opening paragraphs while the lights slowly came up over the front of a castle (the backdrop). Then, suddenly, Dracula would swoop over the audience; the doors of the castle would creak open slightly and he would swoop inside. (A very nice job done with the actor playing Dracula on a wire harness, and two techs behind the castle doors opening them at just the right time. The audience usually took quite a start at it, and were sufficiently spooked and unsettled that the play had a perfect atmosphere for the opening scenes.

The play’s run ended on a Sunday matinee performance. Because many of the actors were amateurs and worked day jobs, it was decided to have the cast part on the Saturday night before the Sunday matinee- a pretty standard concept.

Sunday morning, a few hours before the last performance, the actor playing Dracula didn’t show up. The stage manager grabbed a friend and looked everywhere- and eventually found him in the area where the cast party had been. The actor was still completely drunk from the party. In horror, the stage manager went through every “quick sobering up” practice he had ever heard- giving the actor lots of coffee, feeding him a huge breakfast, throwing him into a cold shower, etc.

Showtime comes, and the actor is still staggering a bit- but the show must go on. So the actor is loaded into the wire harness, the narrator begins reading his parts, and the actor begins zooming through the air on the harness. At which point, the zigging and zagging mixes the copious amount of alcohol in the actor’s stomach with the huge, greasy breakfast the stage manager had forced him to eat. And so, directly over the audience’s head, the actor begins to… disgorge. Loudly. And copiously.

The techs, watching this front behind the castle walls, begin to fall into hysterics. They double up with laughter and cannot be stopped. And cannot remember to open the doors for Dracula to swing in through, so the actor zigs, zags through the air, puking all the while, and then slams into the doors of the castle and falls out of the harness. The castle doors open, and a hand reaches out and drags the actor’s poor unconcious form into the castle.

The play was ended and money refunded.

14

Worst stage production I’ve ever seen: The Merchant of Venice at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. We left at intermission…three HOURS into the play. For some bizarre reason, the director took one of Shakespear’s funniest works (after Much Ado, of course) and turned it into a melodramatic, agnsty diatrabe of anger and rage about…well…I’m not sure what it was about. Every punchline, instead of being said for laughs, was shouted. And repeated. In a louder shout. At least three times. Three times! THREE TIMES IT WAS SHOUTED!!! But there were video monitors all over the stage showing video of gardens and waterfalls instead of a garden set, so I guess it was Art. (The weirdest thing was that the critics were slobbering over themselves fawning over this piece of dung.)

Worst stage production I’ve ever been in: Hair. Performed by community theater. I think I was one of three cast members over the age of 18. As a result, the producer made us cut every reference to sex, drugs or nudity. Uh…WTF? It’s HAIR, for chrissake’s! Sadly enough, it was still better than The Merchant of Venice.

15

Shaw’s Saint Joan. At the Shaw Festival in Canada, fer cryin’ out loud! Overartsy production, but the worst part was that the director didn’t like the last act, and wanted to take it out. The Shaw Estate, or whoever enforces these things, wouldn’t let them – if they wanted to perform the play, they had to do it as written (with, I imagine, some leeway for minor changes). So, in protest, they performed the entire last act by reciting the lines in lackluster fashion from behind podiums. If you’re gonna do they play, do it right. Taking an entire act and deliberately performing it badly doesn’t make your point – it just makes you look bad.

I saw a great performance of Saint Joan at Manhattan’s Circle in the Square, staring Lynn Redgrave. It also had a way pre-Deep Space Nine Armin Shimerman. And they left the last act in.

16

My wife and I get season tickets to the university theater every year. Most of the time, it’s quite good; I would gladly have paid to see last fall’s Little Shop of Horrors again. But sometimes…

The most recent play we saw was called My Sister In This House. It’s based on the real-life story of Lea and Christine Papin, incestuous lesbian sisters who in the 1930s murdered their employer and her daughter in the house in which they worked. Now, you’d think it’d be hard to make a story about incestuous lesbian murderers boring, but by God they did it. The audience just laughed at the murder scene, it seemed so out of place after the boredom that came before.

17

Back at University, I used to get a subscription to various stage shows at the Fine Arts Center. You had to buy a certain number and some years the selections were stronger than others. So one year, we opted for something called (more or less) “An Evening of Scottish Dance and Culture”. It was cheesily embarrassing. The cast was late-middle-aged and the level of sophistication was that of a cheap wedding dance band – ersatz Scottish culture such as “Danny Boy”, “The Banks of Loch Lomond” and some bad clogging. We left at intermission.

18

You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a small Alabama town’s version of The Sound of Music - “We’ns come for da Cap’n. Heil Hidler!” Also it helps when the Captain is about 50 and Maria is played by his 16 year old neice, and neither can sing. :: shudder :: I swear I started cheering for the Nazis.

I went to a small college where the English Dept would give extra credit to everyone who attended a campus production. Which made the Theatre Dept happy because there was always an audience. Except when we did Hedda Gabler. Ibsen is never a big draw, but this was sad. The supporting cast was great (thank you very much) but the leads were horrid. And our Hedda, although beautiful, was an absolute bitch and refused to learn her lines. The doctor insisted in talking like Guy Pardo and wouldn’t follow the blocking, wandering all over the stage, pontificating all the while. When the end finally came, the last performance was to four people (4!) in the audience, and the director was begging me to put real ammunition in the starter’s pistol used for Hedda’s offstage suicide.

19

I saw a travelling production of West Side Story once that was so badly staged everybody laughed when Tony was shot. I felt embarassed for the actors.

20

Montgomery reminds me- I saw a college production of Amadeus that was spectacularly awful. The actor who played Salieri did so in a “Mama mia! That’s a spicy meat-a-ball!” accent that came and went throughout the evening and, in a scene when he’s supposed to be enraptured by Mozart’s music, it could not have been more clear that he was simulating being on the receiving end of fellatio (I was embarassed for him as he seemed to lack the sense to be embarassed for himself). Mozart was portrayed with no zeal or passion, the “sets” used for a palace were a projected slide of the dining room at Biltmore (instantly recognizable to anybody who’d ever been there) and the Emperor Joseph had clearly been inspired by Samuel Jackson’s performance in Pulp Fiction. Simply dreadful.