When I was in high school, we did Something’s Afoot, The Wizard of Oz, Up the Down Staircase and Harvey. The other night I watched an old screwball comedy with Rosalind Russell called My Sister Eileen which was originally a stage play (and before that, it was a book, but I digress), and I thought how easily the story could be performed by a high school drama club.
What plays are being performed by high school drama clubs nowadays? They’ve got to be more up-to-date than Grease, Arsenic and Old Lace, Private Lives and Our Town.
I think you’d be surprised how often those “classics” are done. More often than not it comes down to the royalties that have to be paid to the authors and leasing house and the older shows tend to be much cheaper. Plays are also cheaper by more than half of a musical.
Most of the school around here stick with the classic plays and musicals. Newer musicals are often too complex and require too much talent and too much expense for sets and effects. Older musicals didn’t have fancy stages, and would allow a scrim to be used in some scenes so that sets could be changed. Now, that sort of scene is rarely included in a musical.
Also, many modern plays have language that can’t be used in a school production. I doubt The Mothucker with the Hat* will be anything a school would be able to put on.
We did *Cabaret *in 1973 (directed by Friends’ David Crane, a classmate of mine) and it was quite the scandal. Nazis, prostitution, abortion, homosexuality, and some really *feelthy *choreography. We had shocked walkouts every night, very Springtime for Hitler.
When he was in middle school, we had (to my great surprise an AWESOME) Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Music Man, and a few others.
ETA - I was very surprised that they did Mulan, since the perennial problem in school drama is always that there aren’t enough guys, right? Well, there weren’t enough guys, so it was a bit distracting that half of the army was boys, half of the army was girls, and one of the army was a girl pretending to be a boy in fear of her life.
I can’t believe any school would okay Grease for a high school cast. The moral of the story is “You have to be a slut to fit in and to have a boyfriend.” What high school wants to send that message?
Some of you sound like your school districts have a lot of money.
Schools still do Li’l Abner? I played Abner as a high school junior back in 1980, and while it was terribly dated even then, I had a real blast with that show.
High schools around here usually balance between traditional fare for the parents and grandparents, and more modern stuff for the students. Let’s see, we’ve had Noises Off, The Laramie Project, Little Shop of Horrors, Seussical, Nunsense, Pippin … lots more I am forgetting. Not much high school Shakespeare gets done here, though.
Not in the play (not in the movie, either, but thanks to a real quick cut and Danny taking off his Letter sweater, the point is somewhat lost.)
The moral of the story in the play is that people who want to make it work make sacrifices to make themselves fit better with the other person, even if their friends think they’re crazy. Plus, there’s sort of a Gift of the Magi thing going on, where Sandy gets slutty and Danny gets preppy, and then of course they don’t “match” in the other direction from where they started out.
Hey, I didn’t say it was a great moral, but there it’s less one sided than people often claim.
And yes, we did it in high school. The biggest concern was Rizzo’s pregnancy scare. The biggest concern *should *have been all 30 girls in the cast flashing the boys back stage just before “Greased Lightening”, but the parents never found out about that.
