One year, my college did an adaptation of the Greek tragedy “The Bacchae”, and for whatever reason, they decided what it needed was African dance. So, they’d do a scene, then dance, then go on to the next scene.
They also put on Caryl Churchill’s play “Softcops”, which is just a confusing, post-modernist play to begin with, and they made it more confusing by, for whatever reason, crossgender casting a bunch of the roles.
It’s not the worst production I’ve seen – the actors and sets were great and all – but the most annoying version of Amadeus I saw was put on at Utah’s Pioneer Memorial Theater. They tend to be very family-oriented and protective over there (see my thread about the Cable Decency Bill), so they “cleaned up” the production. All of Mozart’s language was censored! The whole point of Salieri’s outrage was that God had bestowed His gifts and blessings on what Salieri saw as a vulgar, undeserving child. Only, in this production, the muzzled Mozart didn’t really get a chance to be vulgar. You ended up thinking “Well, why shouldn’t God Mozart all those capabilities? This Salieri is a nut!”
I saw a civic theater rendition (or rendering) of Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You In The Closet, And I’m Feeling So Bad in Bradenton, Florida. Oh, Dad is an absurd play that had a nice run on Broadway, and it may have the longest title of any Broadway play. The leading lady broke her leg the day before opening night. The stand-in actually read from a copy of the script all the way through, apparently the second or third time she had ever seen it. The rest of the cast looked rattled and embarrassed. So sad.
The Vagina Monologues, no question. It had some good points, but it got lost in a much of trival nonesense about “What would my Vagina wear?” and some girl saying the word cunt 20 bazillion times in a row for some reason I’m still unsure of. I suspect it’s because I wasn’t the target audience.
I spent most of the play wondering when it would be over, and found the movie AVP(which was only a mediocre movie) to be superiour as far as keeping my interest was concerned.
Without question, the worst stage production I’ve ever seen was a college production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof which took the daring (and stupid) step of casting a male actor as Maggie. Yes, I know that Tennessee Williams was gay. But having a draggy Maggie kinda takes the punch out of the revelations about Brick and Skipper. Not to mention the bit about Maggie claiming to be pregnant.
I found myself wishing that they had camped it up and turned the play into a full-out genderbender comedy. Things might have been more interesting if, in addition to a male Maggie, they had gone with a hefty, butch gal as Big Daddy.
OMG, MaxTorque, for some reason this is the funniest thing I’ve read all week. May I sig?
Vampires simply cannot get a break on Broadway these days–the worst musical I ever saw there was DANCE OF THE VAMPIRES in early 2003. I posted about it here.
Recently I caught one of the last few performances of PACIFIC OVERTURES at Studio 54. BD Wong is a fine singer but no way he had the presence and voice to be the Narrator. The set got boring fast and there was no energy even though the matinee was being taped for the Library of Performing Arts, which means the performers are usually doing their best for posterity. Even “Pretty Lady” seemed to drag.
Straight plays–uh, WINTERTIME by Charles Mee off-Broadway had one of the prettiest sets and most incoherent second acts I’ve ever seen. And in a snowstorm, at a temple’s community theater in Newton, MA, I saw a production of Terrence McNally’s 1985 insider-theater comedy IT’S ONLY A PLAY in which the audience of relatives and friends (yo!) got practically NONE of the jokes. Even one about Ira being George Gershwin’s sister met with crickets. Gah.
Tartuffe has long been a synonym for “theatrical production so bad it must be walked out of” in our family.
Of course, in our case, it wasn’t just a play… it was an OPERA!
We (my parents and my sister and I) also walked out of what might have been a good play, but it was set in Ireland, and all the actors spoke with such thick Irish accents that we just couldn’t understand a thing that was going on.
This isn’t fair, but: The worst stage production I’ve ever seen was a real-life Red, White, and Blaine. Yes, the pageant show in Waiting for Guffman.
This goes back to 1987, when I was a senior in high school, so it predates Guffman by quite a bit. This production was specifically written for the hundredth anniversary of the founding of a small logging town, which at the time I saw the show had become a medium-sized extremely depressed ex-logging town. It was produced by town hall and performed by the senior class of the high school (they had only the one).
I remember only three things about it:[ul][]I left midway through. I was going to leave at intermission, but I double-checked the program and found that there wasn’t one. So I waited for a blackout, and then I fled up the aisle and banged loudly through the exit door before the lights could come back up. I still feel sort of bad about it: not for leaving, but for not leaving more quietly.[]The lead actress, playing the pioneer founder’s wife, was flat as a board, so there was some sort of costume adjustment made in an effort to give her a figure. She wound up looking sort of… pointy.When I saw Waiting for Guffman later, the similarities were so uncanny that the movie merged with my memories of the play and I no longer have any confidence in clearly distinguishing between what actually happened on stage and what I’m conflating from the film. That’s why I can’t give a more specific rundown on the awfulness of the play. Just imagine sitting through Red, White, and Blaine, and you’ve got it.[/ul]Doesn’t really compare with an airborne vomiting vampire, but there you go.
Mine was a local production of an original work, The Crawl Space Waltz. It was a sort-of-one-woman show - that is, about 95% of the speaking was by one the lead actress/writer, but there was also an actor onstage who would periodically dance with her or toss in a few words in the voice of her mother/husband/imaginary friend. I am unsure whether the main character was supposed to be insane or whether that was just the actress. Either way - the script was horrible: it meandered, never really advanced, and we were unsure, when it finally ended, that it was the end because there was no conclusion. The lead character was supposedly doing a number of different dance steps: she would say “and then I learned the foxtrot” and follow that with several steps that were exactly the same as what she’d done for the waltz, rhumba, twist, salsa, cha-cha, etc.
Upon exiting, the theater manager actually apologized to us and offered free tickets for a future performance at the theater.
Edinburgh, 1998
I’m a college kid abroad travelling on my own, first time in Scotland. So I check out the local newspaper to see what some of the better shows were. This play was listed among all the other top billing shows with no hint that it was anything other than a major production.
When I got there, it was a small community college, and the play turned out to be an educational documentary/discussion about AIDS. Put on by very amateur actors (no actual acting, just mugging). There were two intermissions with audience participatory discussion.
I felt very, very foolish.
College theater does Shakespeare
My college once put on Henry V, and did it with only six cast members. The king of England was also the King of France, for example. He didn’t even bother speaking differently when he changed roles, nor was there a costume change (everyone wore the same weird period-less black wrapping) so it was quite confusing to tell which king he was at any given time (and in which court the current scene was taking place).
The big battle scene was done as a mosh pit with grungy 90s rock thudding into our ears and a horrific light show. Everyone was always in the same black clothing except during the battle when the two people playing arrogant French knights wore iridescent silver, and FULL SIZE HORSE COSTUMES (you know, where there’s a hole in the horse’s back that your entire body fits into, to make it seem like you’re riding the thing?)
Oh, and the captured-French-princess scene towards the end was agonizing. True to bad avant garde form, the director had chosen to turn it practically into a rape scene. The king of England delivered all his lines while pawing, grabbing, and practically licking the captured princess, who drowned out the lines by over-acting with anguished hysterics.
My Own Experience
I travelled with a high school commedia dell’arte group for six weeks one summer in Europe. We were ok, but it’s hard to do commedia when most of your audiences don’t speak English, and you can’t speak French, Flemish, or German. In Ghent, we were participating in a street theater festival. It was our second performance of all - the first, in Antwerp had not gone well, and we were nervous and demoralized.
Well, we were finally starting to gather an audience (I guess most Belgians can speak English) when one of us stepped squarely on a female audience member’s foot. And she didn’t just yelp. She started howling and hopping up and down on one foot.
The performance proceeded to enter a definite downswing after that. 
But not to worry; we hit our stride when we finally started performing for the kids instead of the adults.
"Careful, they’re hot"
Not sure if this one counts because it involved a juggling act, not a play, but I once saw a juggler lose control of his flaming torches and zinged one out into the crowd. In front of two kids. Who were sitting on dry bales of hay.
He leapt out to recover the torch before it could burn anyone or start a fire. Then, after a terrible pause, he quipped “Careful, they’re hot.” and kept right on juggling. I have to hand it to him for his determination to go on with the show, even though the stunned kids and their family got right out of there.
Sweeney Todd at a Cape Cod summer stock theater a few years back.
Frankly, it could have been in London and it would have sucked. It’s a horrible musical, made worse by bad acting and staging. the “mad woman” character looked vaguely neurotic, but the bloody walls and backdrop made up for that…
How about Annie done a capella? Saw that in community theater (children’s) many years ago–trust me, the score is there for a reason!
A performance of “Frankenstein” (viewed as part of Academic Decathalon- don’t ask) at UOP a few years back.
The acting was passable at best (it did have good sets, I’ll grant it that), but what really killed it was the lighting and use of the curtain during scene changes.
Or, to be precise, that they DIDN’T lower the curtain or dim the lights during scene changes.
Because they didn’t do this, it resulted in several scenes where we could quite clearly see actors who had been killed onstage a few moments earlier get up, as well as the backstage crew pushing the scenes in and out.
I left at intermission.
I’ve seen stage productions ranging from Phantom at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London to community theater in Guthrie, Oklahoma, and I can’t say I’ve seen anything I’d categorize as “bad”.
This means either …
O.M.G. that’s hysterical!
Big Daddy: So Maggie is that life you got in your midsection or are you just happy to see me?
I saw a production of this one time that I thought was hurt by the fact Brick was too-gay, but the drag aspect is right out of Guffman.
The worst musical/play I had ever seen was a repertory production of “Into the Woods”. I should’ve known it would be bad when I found out the theatre was above a bowling alley, but I thought I’d give it a chance since I previously had great luck with amateur/repertory companies.
Man, that was a mistake.
It was terrible. The actors couldn’t sing (“Agony” really was agony), the pre-recorded music was bland and MIDI-like, the Giant’s part was pre-recorded VERY badly, and the whole thing was honestly unenjoyable.
Ironically, every actual Irish person I’ve ever known, despite a variety of accent, has been quite comprehensible. It’s actually quite a pleasant accent.
The only production I ever walked out of was simply “Inherit the Wind”. Good performance, but I realized after 10 minutes that, despite having never seen or read it, I knew everything that was going to happen.
I felt sort of depressed about that and left at intermission.
John Corrado, I read your tale of Dracula, and had to apologize to the people on either side of me, sitting at the computer banks at the library. I was trying to hold in hysterical laughter, and they thought I was having some kind of fit!
I’d say where I saw this production of OurTown, but I linked to this thread on my LJ, and they might find it.
It was overall an okay production but they had the same problem. Quite specifically in the script, the year is explictly mentioned several times (“The year right now is 1922”). However, when the two children are supposed to be talking to each other from their respective bedroom windows, they were IMing each other. 
The actors would pantomime typing, and an IM window was projected onto the backdrop of the set, showing what they were saying to each other. And yes, IM-speak was used (“c u 2morrow”).
Rent.
On Broadway, fer crissake.
So much for reading the reviews and listening to the critics.
Even after reading the Playbill, I still don’t know what it was about.
My wife and I got up at intermission, and never looked back. (At least we got into a good restaurant before all the theatres let out.)
In the early 70s, our church hosted a traveling troupe doing a production of Jesus Christ, Superstar. All of the costumes were badly sewn bedsheets. No one sang - it was entirely lip-sync’d to the records. The director apparently came up with only one dramatic expression - picture a performer with his arms outstretched forward, palms up, waving his arms up and down to emphasize the “drama”.
It was beyond bad. I give amateur performers the benefit of a lot of doubt because I know I couldn’t get up on stage and act, but I know I could have done better than these guys.