…including amateur and professional plays and musicals?
My top two candidates are things my parents dragged me to as a child growing up in NYC.
In Circles was a 1967 off-Broadway musical in which the words of Gertrude Stein were set to music.* N.Y. Times critic Clive Barnes (who liked it) said in his review, “There was no story, only words dropped in the air like cylinders of tear gas.”
I did not enjoy it.
Earlier I was subjected to the abuse of being taken to the “satirical play” America Hurrah, a searing and horrifically boring sendup of American consumerism and the Vietnam War. It has largely been blotted from my memory except for the last of the three one-act plays, which featured grossly obese, nude male and female papier-mache figures who were attempting to get it on.
I appreciate that my parents may have been attempting to broaden my horizons. But it’s hard to forgive being made to suffer through those productions and then being left at home while the rest of the family went to see the musical Oliver!.
*sample lines: “Papa dozes, Mama blows her noses” and “There’s an army in my bedroom”.
We went to see Damn Yankees at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank. I’ve seen a High School version that was better. It was too long and too poorly directed. Terribly disappointing.
A performance of The Nutcracker by a troupe that traveled all the way to Alaska to perform it. The lead ballerina was overweight and quite literally stomped across the stage.
The worst professional performance I’ve seen was a production of Movin’ Out. It was basically a dance performance set to Billy Joel songs. The choreography was awful from the start, a bunch of people randomly writhing around to the music. I knew how bad it was when I realized it was more interesting watching the band than the dancers.
For amateur productions, there were several at the college where I work. One was a weird dance thing that I think was supposed to represent birth and death. It didn’t help that it was in a makeshift theater that had no ventilation.
Another was Hamlet: Iran, setting Shakespeare in 1943 Iran. The author was Iranian and didn’t realize Americans were unfamiliar with the events. One great reveal was a sudden image of Moses Mossadegh – someone I doubt ten people in the audience recognized.
There also was The Grippe of October, about the Spanish Flu epidemic, written by a relative of a big college donor.
They did The Children’s Hour. The play would have been fine, but they decided to set the second act in the present day (the first act was time appropriate), which killed the drama. The big shocker of the play was that one of the teachers was gay, which has no shock value in 2013.* Further, the questioning of the two girls who made the charges had them both in the room, a practice that isn’t done anymore in order to prevent the actual problem the play shows.
And then there was The Painting. Billed as the story of how the Mona Lisa was hidden during the Nazi occupation, it was an attempt at silent slapstick without a single laugh.
*Not for the audience so much, but it was unlikely (and even possibly illegal) to fire a gay woman except in a religious school (which the play didn’t show).
I recall a community theater production in which Hindu gods wreak vengeance against the officials who ordered the mass slaughter of cattle with mad cow disease.
A college production of Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class. No complaint with the players or crew, but the play is set in a kitchen with a lamb in a playpen. They couldn’t find a local lamb, so they substituted a baby goat.
That goat was not staying put in the playpen for love nor money, and the actors spent the entire performance grabbing it as it tried to leap free and wrestling it back in, all the while keeping in character and running their lines.
A quick visit to NYC. Four of us had time for one play, and my friend said “Trust me, it’s way off-Broadway, but you’ll lovvvve this.”
Well, none of us lovvvved Vampire Lesbians of Sodom… I’m sure it was shocking (and meant more) in the early 80s when it was written. But nowadays, guys in fluorescent dresses screeching their lines, wrestling with each other in the aisles, and trying so hard to be over-the-top was just painful.
But, come to think of it, it wasn’t horrible, and if that’s the worst I’ve seen… I’ve had a long life full of good theater!
Worst I ever saw was an off-Broadway production of one of my favorite plays, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST. Some Hispanic actor, probably through favoritism or disaster (like the real actor dying) or colossal bad judgment, was cast in the lead role. It’s not that he was Hispanic but he had a fairly heavy Puerto Rican (I think, maybe Cuban) accent and everyone else played it straight with plummy British pronunciation. I thought maybe he, or the director, was trying to make a point about cultural stereotypes or something of the sort, but I don’t think so, mainly because the actor gave a faux-British sound to most of his lines, but fell ridiculously short of pulling it off. I think he was trying to play the part as Wilde wrote it but just did not have anything resembling the chops to do so. It was just a brutal performance that pulled everyone’s attention away from the play. This was in the Village, maybe late or mid 1970s. I still have nightmares and wake up screaming. I wonder who that actor was.
A community theatre group produced Lysistrata here shortly before Covid, with lots of “creative” additions.
In one scene, they had all the women prance around while holding bobbing pink balloons (twisted into phallic shapes) pressed to their groins. “Cringeworthy” does not begin to describe the experience of sitting in a small theatre, only a few feet away from the performers, and witnessing that.
Not quite what the OP had in mind, but the thread title instantly brought to mind the disastrous school production of Peter Pan documented in This American Life, Opening Night
You know how churches put on Christmas musicals and so forth? My brother and sister-in-law’s church did them for years, but they were written by the Pastor of church.
All trash, all terrible. I saw two of them at least and the whole church liked the pastor so much, they…well, I think they convinced themselves they were good.
But…nope. Bad scripts, bad songs. Bad acting, but that is to be expected at a church event.
I’m going to limit this to professional theater, because it’s not fair to amateur groups.
The second-worst production I saw was at the giant St. Louis Muny Opera outdoor production of West Side Story, starring Barry Williams (aka “Greg Brady”) as Tony. Williams gave it his all, but after rehearsals and five days of performances in the St. Louis summer heat, his voice was completely shot and he could barely croak through the score. Halfway through Act I we were praying that Chino would just go ahead and kill Tony before he had to sing “Maria.” It was painful.
The absolute nadir of my theater experience was an early preview of what was supposed to be the Broadway-bound* comedy Legends!, starring Mary Martin and Carol Channing. The combined age of the two at that time was >150 years old, and they were clearly past the point of being able to do anything more than one-line walk-on parts. A tiny little bit of stage business by Mary Martin that lasted maybe three seconds just served as a sad reminder of how good they had been in their prime.
*After touring the country for something like 300 performances, the show closed, never getting to Broadway. Martin left the show after her big dramatic scene was cut. The show has been revived several times but it can’t stand on its own without two big stars.
Does Cirque de Soleil count? I would think so. Therefore, I nominate Viva Elvis! The show opened at Aria and lasted 2 years out of sheer stubbornness. We were there opening night. Total crap. The performers gave it their all, and the band was on fire and one of the best show bands I’ve ever encountered, but the script sucked, the concept was stupid, the direction was abysmal, etc., etc. The music of The King wasn’t enough to make it live. Add in Opening Night bobbles and it was definitely the worst professional theater performance I’ve seen.
I haven’t seen very many plays or musicals, now that I think about it. Of all of them, I guess the singular amateur high school production I saw would objectively/technically be the worst. It wasn’t bad, though, and I enjoyed it. I can’t remember what it was called, except it featured one song which frequently had the lyric “I figured it out!”
The worst experience I ever had was seeing a production of Guys and Dolls at what I think was The Orpheum in San Francisco. Due to my hearing loss I couldn’t understand anything that was said nor any of the lyrics. I still have no clue what the musical is about. I was bored to tears.
As part of the finale of our sixth grade class’s DARE program (for non-Americans, DARE is a program where a cop teaches your class for an hour a week and tells you about the evils of drugs and how if you so much as stand in the same room where someone is smoking a cigarette it will ruin your life), we had to perform a short play at an all-school assembly. It was, as you can imagine, ridiculously over-the-top and full of scaremongering, propaganda, and misinformation. I got cast to play the villain - Marijuana.
My lines were full of ridiculous nonsense like “Just one puff and then, you’re addicted, you’re mine for life.” Having an innate flair for the dramatic, I absolutely hammed it up for every second that I was onstage, tenting my fingers a la Mr. Burns, wildly varying the intonation of my delivery, and throwing in an occasional evil laugh. The teacher was apparently completely OK with my deviation from the dialogue as written, because it at least got the kids to pay attention, but it was definitely a bad show even by sixth grade standards.
