I have a theater degree so I have seen many, many subpar productions over the years. When a friend asks you if you’ll see their show, you say yes, because you hope they’ll see yours.
The most painful production I can remember was a vanity staging of Neil Simon’s God’s Favorite with a local TV personality footing the bill so he could play the lead. As if that weren’t enough, he dismissed the director halfway through and assumed that as his second job. A couple of my friends were in it and I got roped into dialect coaching. It was awful, an ego trip on steroids.
The worst high-profile professional show I’ve seen was the Broadway adaptation of the movie High Fidelity. It closed after eleven performances and I was there for the eleventh. Not by design; I had my ticket well in advance of opening and was just lucky enough to sneak in under the wire. It was wretched; half the choices were terribly obvious, pale copies of the movie (e.g. they had a Great Value Jack Black in the co-clerk role); and where they did something differently to distinguish themselves from the movie, they invariably made the dumbest possible choice (e.g. the lead character broke the fourth wall with high-energy cheerful enthusiasm instead of detached irony). It was awful, but I’m glad I saw it, in a kind of “I can’t believe what I’m looking at” sort of way.
Seriously, my mom’s done some great stuff in community theater, but the last thing she did, a few years ago, is my nomination for the thread. I’ve blocked most of it from my memory, but I think it was Christmas-themed and everyone played multiple parts and it was absolutely incoherent. She begged us not to go, but we were fools.
Whenever “that play your mom did in Palatka that time” is mentioned, everyone recoils in horror and changes the subject to something nicer, like the time Uncle Dan’s second wife’s grandfather got arrested for molesting her kids.
The worst professional show I’ve ever attended - “Once Were Warriors - The Musical.”
As I understand it, “Once Were Warriors” was a bestselling book that got turned into a huge movie (in NZ), and someone decided “let’s make a musical.” The cast was amazingly talented.
However, the script was bad. The songs were not good (well sung, but not good). The dancing was also really well done, but really frequently the dancing did not fit the emotional tone of the moment. There are times that call for breakdance battles and then there are times where maybe contemporary movement might fit better or even better yet, nothing at all.
It was also very miscast - there were a few roles where being Maori was key to the story being told, but were not played by Maori actors. Also, there were roles where the characters were tweens or younger, but they were played by people in their early-to-mid 20s. This might not have been a problem for people familiar with the story. I wasn’t so a lot of the character choices didn’t make sense because I thought the characters were 27. (seriously, because of casting and staging, it took me halfway through the first act to figure out that one of the main characters was the daughter and not the next-door-neighbor. I never found out she was an actual child until I went home and watched the movie.)
Speaking of staging, the director threw people on stage due to their singing and dancing ability. Characters just kept showing up in scenes where they really shouldn’t have been - but the actor could hit the notes or do the choreography.
Silver lining, the movie is really good - never would have seen it had I not sat through that production.
Ooh disagree with this one. I thought Mr Burns was a brilliantly written depiction of art and culture and how humans will always create some form of entertainment/art. I thought it was really interesting how a random piece of pop entertainment was elevated to the status of revered classic because that was all that was left of the older culture. I saw the original 2013 Playwrights Horizon production and I don’t remember it being sold as a light-hearted romp. I knew it was a post-apocalyptic satirical drama going on. I guess if you expected a silly comedy you’d be disappointed.
I have stories about two of the productions mentioned above.
I’m a huge fan of Billy Joel, have all of his albums and can sing most of his songs. One year for my birthday, my family decided to take me to see “Moving Out.” I was thrilled by the show - I loved every minute of it. When the lights came up, my Mom apologized to me for taking me to she such a terrible show on my birthday - it turned out that my entire family had basically shared Reality Chuck’s opinion and hated the show. I tried to explain that I loved it, and it was a great birthday present, but no one really believed me.
My family was invited by someone involved in the production to see that Kennedy Center production of “Whistle Down the Wind” and provide a review for use in working out the problems before the anticipated Broadway run. I was tasked with writing down everyone’s suggestions. I didn’t think the show was terrible, but we all saw a lot of room for improvement. It never did make it to Broadway, although it has been produced in the West End and elsewhere.
Probably my least favorite theatrical production was a production of “Piaf”, about Edith Piaf, that I saw in Sacramento. It just confused me, and I had no idea what was going on most of the time.
I also once saw a very bad “Annie Get Your Gun” in San Francisco that seemed more like a high school play than a national tour.
I was drug to a high school production of The Wizard of Oz. The only thing worth seeing was the drummer in the band, he was a John Bonham wanna be. At the end of the play there was some polite applause for everyone but the drummer, he got a standing ovation.
I enjoyed the music in Moving Out, but the choreography was probably the worst I’ve ever seen in a professional performance. Once I stopped trying to watch it, I liked the music.
The ironic thing is that Joel has the chops to write a book musical if he wanted to. If he had been born 30 years earlier, he could have been a noted Broadway composer/lyricist.
I accepted the lead in a play back in the late 80’s without reading the script because I was friends with the director and it was a finalist in the Baltimore Playwrights Festival (the same festival that discovered “A Soldier’s Story”).
Needless to say, the show was terrible. It was called “Horseplay” by Thurston Griggs and was a meandering autobiographical tale of the author’s youth on a ranch. Nothing of consequence happened throughout the play, the audiences hated it, and we closed without fanfare after 3 performances.
I asked the director afterwards why he agreed to do the show in the first place. He told me that the author asked him to direct if it was picked as a finalist. My friend agreed after reading the script and thinking there was no chance in hell it would make it that far.
My “too mature for high school” friend took me to an evening of eight Sam Beckett plays. All of the sets were just an empty stage, though a couple had sides of beef hanging from hooks. I honestly can’t recall a single word of dialog. I do recall that leaving sure felt good…
So thirty years later, I’m traveling Europe with a friend who says we’ve GOT to go see this play! It’s a Beckett! And this woman does hour-long soliloquies from a huge four foot tall mound of excrement!
I really enjoyed abandoning him and going to a real play all by myself instead.
Well, then you haven’t experienced the 1973 Belushi version. You can skip the ever-so-refined introduction and catch the one minute of Actual Play at 1:35…
I saw a professional production of Acadia where one of the main actors carried a script around with him, and read from it.
Ok, he was an understudy so I cut him some slack. But my friend saw the show a week later and he was still carrying the script around with him. I would think a professional actor, who was an understudy, would be able to memorize a script within a week. Right?
That reminds me of an all-white production I saw of “The Wiz”. It was directed by Howard University’s theater professor, so avoided the racist label. It wasn’t bad, but the young girl playing Dorothy struggled with the vocals.
Ha. I went to a Reduced Shakespeare Company show about 20 years ago where one of the actors, playing a drama star at a community college, claimed to have performed in the first-ever all-white performance of “Ain’t Misbehavin’”.
I may have been too harsh on my parents in the OP.
While they did drag me to some real dogs, their penchant for picking flops meant that the family was sometimes spared when productions for which they’d bought advanced tickets closed in previews or after just a few performances, before we could get to see them.
For instance, Anyone Can Whistle. It had star power (Angela Lansbury and Lee Remick), and a young Stephen Sondheim providing the music and lyrics. What could go wrong?
Just about everything, it turned out.
"As Sondheim would later write in Finishing the Hat , he and Laurents had perhaps “overstepped … the very thin line between smart and smart-ass.”
“The reviews were brutal. “Anyone Can Whistle,” said Walter Kerr in the Herald Tribune , “but no one can sing.””
I don’t know if this counts as a theatrical production, but many years ago while A Prairie Home Companion was still on the air Garrisn Keillor made an appearance here in Portland on the big stage at the Arlene Schnitzer Music Hall. My SIL scored some tickets because his radio show was fairly entertaining at the time, and we thought watching such antics live on stage might be worth the cost of the tickets.
There was no “show”, there were no other guests, and the only person laughing at the end of the night was his booking agent. It was an hour and a half of him droning on and on and on and fucking on about his dreary and depressing life being brought up in Anoka, Minnesota. If the word “monotone” had been unknown at the start of his one man crusade to give an audience a reason to mass suicide, it would have been on the lips of the survivors at the end of this production. Ninety minutes of talk about hardship, bad weather, hardship, bad parenting, hardship, loneliness and hardship.
My Sister-In-Law offered to take us out to dinner afterwards to make up for getting us tickets, but I said that suffering through it with us was punishment enough.
In 1973, my mother took me to a community theater production of Dracula that she was reviewing for the local radio station. The theater company was earnest, but the result was pretty distressing.
The set was not only absolutely minimal, with no backdrops except dark curtains in every scene, but they used a mixed batch of furniture that looked like it came from a bunch of different farm kitchens. The furniture did not begin to suggest a castle, a Victorian bedroom, or whatever. The coffin was a bland box obviously made of cheap plywood painted flat black.
The actor playing Drac tripped over the furniture several times, in spite of the fact that there were only four or five pieces on stage at any time. Entrances were late, the lighting didn’t correspond to the action on-stage, and it was easy to hear many of the prompts to actors from the wings.
The audience laughed quite a bit…but not in a good way. My mother reviewed it by mostly concentrating on the good intentions of the company and not on the actual production itself. She was often too generous.
I saw a high school production of Dracula. There was a scene where a bat was supposed to fly into a fireplace and up a chimney, but the string the bat was attached to broke and Van Helsing basically grabbed the bat and threw it up the chimney instead. A little awkward, but otherwise it was a decent show.
