Worst plays or musical productions you've seen or been in

Cafe Society
1

The favorite moments in musical theatre got me to thinking (read: cringing) about some of the horrible theatre I’ve ever sat through, and worse, productions I’m embarassed to say I’ve worked on. I’m not talking costume malfunctions, scenery toppling on the leads, a party balloon accidentally falling from the flys onto the stage and getting kicked around by the dancers (okay it was during The Nutcracker and it kinda was pretty though it shouldn’t have been there, but I digress), or the fact that the microphones didn’t work on opening night. I’m talking “the producer owed someone a favor, so that’s how she got to be the lead” and “let’s re-interpret this entire scene so that it makes no sense to anyone but the director” type theatre disasters.

[ul]
[li] Bad ideas - Like the high school production of Godspell with sixty people in the cast (from my understanding, the show was already set, but the principal decided that everyone in the vocal music department should be on stage, so most of the parts were chopped up and divvied out. Character development? Hell, I didn’t know who was supposed to be whom![/li]
[li] Bad casting - She owned the theatre company, so she always got a part. Mmmmkay, might work. Except this was a production of Grease, and okay, most of the performers were in their mid 20’s (a little late looking for high school, but passable for professional theatre). And she was Rizzo, the tough chick. Aged 45, and looked completely out of place. And belted every song like Kim Carnes with laryngitis[/li]
[li] Bad interpretation - Der fliegende Holländer / The Flying Dutchman - I know operatic voices take a while to mature, and tough roles can be hell. I can accept a 40 year-old-woman playing a twenty-something on stage. But dammit, don’t play Senta as this dreamy wuss who won’t make eye contact with anyone except the Dutchman (including the audience) - didn’t lift her eyes at all. She came across more as a woman in serious need of mental help than a redeeming angel. Or she was reading pages of the score scattered across the stage floor.[/li]
[li] Don’t even get me started on Abduction, a locally produced opera which, before I left, I kinda sorta tried to figure out what it was trying to attempt to want to be, and realized it was an adaptation of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail / The Abduction from the Seraglio, but reset in the pirate Jose Gaspar’s time in Tampa-ish, FL. :mad: [/li][/ul]
So folks, gimme the worst theatre productions you ever got a numb butt sitting through, or ones you’re embarassed to say you worked on.

2

The Act One Finale of the musical Bring Back Birdie (an artistically bankrupt sequel to Bye Bye Birdie), which had Donald O’Conner sitting on a toilet bowl stage right while a giant latex tongue, protruding from a large cube stage left, bobbed lasciviously up and down in rhythm to the inhuman noise made by an onstage punk rock back named, appropriately, Filth.

The horror…the horror…

3

That should be Donald O’Connor. R.I.P.

4

That should also be “punk rock band” (sorry—one too many chardonnays at dinner tonight).

5

Wizard of Oz. No question. Worst show in existence. Fuck it, long and hard, right in the ear, with a razor-blade-and-broken-glass-lined ten-foot-long red-hot iron dildo of doom.

Our director fucked us over, man. He designed his show around the idea that he’d have 15 crewmen backstage… he had five. FIVE. And he refused to bring in a couple more hands - who were VERY experienced, VERY good, and willing to do the show - but didn’t simply because he couldn’t control 'em (tech directors turned director directors are some of the worst control freaks I’ve ever met).

So we got screwed, had a pathetically terrible show that required far too much energy from everyone involved. It NEVER looked good. Ever.

Goddamned Wizard…

6

Between my freshman and sophomore years in high school, the English teacher who had directed the school’s musicals for decades decided to retire. His theater directing chores were claimed by the speech team coach. His first production was Lil’ Abner, which was almost passable, due to the fact that there were many veterans of earlier, better productions taking part. Even then, we worried – his directing style was to sit and silently watch, and after rehearsal he’d hand us illegible note cards with his recommendations. And a good portion of the sets were constructed out of styrofoam. (I was the bad guy, General Bullmoose. I had a semi-good time.)

His next effort was Bye Bye Birdie, and for a while I was cast as Conrad Birdie. The problem? I was absolutely wrong for the part. Somewhat overweight, already receding hairline, and an Asian-American Elvis character probably would’ve raised a few eyebrows. Fortunately, the guy who originally had the part rejoined the cast before we opened. (He was on the football team, and he had to wait until they missed the playoffs, or something like that) Unfortunately, the director didn’t have the balls to actually make the call (Robu, you’re out, Tim’s back in) – he forced me to decide. Kind of emotionally wrenching, even though I knew I was wrong for it. THEN, instead of allowing me to go back to my bit part (the mayor), he decided that I would only play half of the performances, so as to not offend the guy who took my place for a while.

But this man’s crowning achievement had to be his production of George M! – a somewhat fictionalized take on the life and times of George M. Cohen. Our director, not realizing that it was supposed to be fictionalized, decided to re-write the portions of the show that he felt should have been more accurate! He even inserted an entire new scene into act two, with a bunch of actors sitting around discussing a portion of Cohen’s life that had been glossed over in the original! And, to add insult to injury, this man couldn’t write to save his life. We all did the best we could with this maimed version of the show (the guy playing the lead was excellent), but this scene killed whatever momentum we had gathered stone dead.

7

In the Second Grade I was in a production of “Wiggle Worm, Wiggle Worm” in which I played a stalk of broccoli. The nun who cast and directed the play had a child who had a speech impediment somewhat similar to Barbara Walters (Bawbawa Wawa) and he could not correctly pronounce “Wiggle Worm, Wiggle Worm” which he was required to say at least 20 times. The entire school was laughing at him, it was incredibly cruel. To top it off, the child’s name was Richard (Wishuwd). I refused to work with that nun on her production of “I know an Old Woman who Swallowed a Fly” due to artistic differences and due to the fact she used to hit me in the head a lot.

8

I had the unfortunate experience of seeing Wait until Dark with Quentin Tarantino and Marissa Tomei a few years back. Now I love Quentin’s movies as much as the next guy, but the man cannot act. That, coupled with the fact that he was playing the main villian (so wonderfully played by Alan Arkin in the movie version), led to some unintentionally funny stuff. There was a scene where Quentin’s character jumps out and it’s supposed to be really scary. The audience broke out in laughter! When we left a woman in the parking garage elevator asked us if we’d just seen Wait Until Dark, “the worst piece of s**t she’d ever seen in her life”. I wish I’d known how bad it was going to be, I would have sold my tickets, they were hard to come by, and selling for about $200 each.

I also saw a pre-Broadway show called Face Value. It was by the author of M Butterfly, David Hwang, and was supposed to be a farce about a non-Asian person (played horribly by talentless hack Mark Linn-Baker) playing an Asian role in a Broadway play. Shades of Jonathan Price in Miss Saigon. We arrived to the theatre to sit in the balcony. The ticket taker looked at our tickets, and told us we could sit anwhere in the back half of the orchestra. The orchestra was still only about half full. At one point, the characters were in a Pirindellian moment, coming out of character to speak directly to the audience. One character said something to the effect of “Why are we here, what are we doing?”, at which point a man in the front row yelled “NO, Why are WE here, and why aren’t you refunding our money?” It was the only time I’ve ever seen a play heckled!

My last story concerns a play the community theatre I worked in in high school did called The Wager. It was a slightly risque comedy, about two roomates, one gay, one a womanizer. The gay roomate bets the other that he can’t bed the woman downstairs, tell her jealous husband, and NOT have the husband kill him. We used to do 2 weeks of shows Wed-Sat, and we never sold many tickets to the Wednesday performances (the theatre held about 60 people). We sold the entire house for the second Wednesday night to a senior citizens group. They sat there in stunned silence, during what was a very funny play, mostly due to the subject matter, and some rough language in the play. About 40 of them left after intermission. There was some pretty heavy drinking THAT night by the cast and crew!

9

I saw a production of the Wizard of Oz where the apple-throwing trees were so wide that the actors inside of them could reach only their hands around the edges. Thus they could only menacingly drop the apples at their own feet and hope some of them rolled towards Dorothy and crew (who nevertheless flinched and ducked the whole time.)

10

I took my nephews and nieces to see what I thought was going to be a stage
play of the Wizard of Oz…

Turns out it was, “The Wiz”

I would have drank Hemlock had it been available during intermission…

11

Oh God, where to start…

Well there was “The Bride”. I had worked summer stock with this company about three years, same director, some changes in cast and crew but always good fun and good shows. But something happened the fourth year. Apparently the director had a fight with the producers or something. Anyway, the show had incest, on stage mastrabation (male and female on opposite sides of the stage), beating of children, a girl having her first period on stage, dry humping and heaven only knows what else. It is the only time I have ever used a stage name rather use my own in the program.

Then there was a show similar to what was mentioned above, the director cast his wife as the romantic lead. She was supposed to be 16 or 17 and she was really 56 and looked it.

Not that long ago, I was in a rep company and we were doing “Deathtrap”, I was playing Sidney but my second lead kept missing rehearsals and didn’t know his lines and then as we neared opening night he disappeared for a week. Then two nights before opening the assistant director got a phone call asking her to bail him out of jail. Much to my dismay she did. Curtain time had to be moved up because part of the agreement in getting him out was that he had to be home by 10:30. He wore one of those ankle alarm bracelets for the entire run, which fortunately was very brief.

I toured with a show where the female romantic lead tried to bed as many of the cast and crew as possible, by half way through the tour most of the males wanted to kill each other and most of the women wanted to kill her.

I did a summer of outdoor drama that the lead had to be a horseman who could handle a gun. They hired a guy who knew nothing about either. If he wasn’t riding off the stage totally out of control (one time we had to stop the show for 20 minutes while we went looking for him), he was dancing around on one leg because he fired his revolver before he pulled it out of his holster thus burning his leg. He was also regularly catching his fingers between the hammer and the cylinder and crying out in pain.

Then there was…

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12

I was involved in a travesty in high school–mostly blocked the memories of it (I can’t even remember the title of the play). My part was that of a seance medium, the smallest part and one which I was not suited for. I can’t make eerie voices for the life of me. In any case, I was the only person who bothered to learn her lines for that scene and ended up having to (rather poorly) ad-lib the whole thing anyway, because with all the mistakes the other cast members made, the scene didn’t make sense at all. I was mortified. And very happy I only had one scene.

I should add that most of them had their lines directly in front of them on the seance table. Maybe that’s why they didn’t think they had to learn their lines! …

Fortunately that was followed up with a great performance of The Sound of Music in which I got to be an irritable nun. It was a lot of fun.

13

[slight hijack]

There was a performance of Agatha Christie’s An Appointment With Death at my HS that nearly produced a real casualty. In the climactic scene, the killer sneaks up behind the heroine and tries to slit her throat. Somehow, though, the rubber prop knife had gotten lost and and one of the cast members borrowed a real one from a stagehand known as “Psycho”. Nobody bothered to check whether the knife was sharp, which, as a matter of fact, it was. Razor sharp. As a result, the actress playing the heroine ended up with a thin line of real blood across her windpipe.

Afterwards (almost) everyone agreed that an actual death on stage was probably the only thing that would have put some “life” into the show.

[/slight hijack]

14

Dallas Opera’s production of Manon – an opera that takes place in Imperial France and is about material excess and the temptation of great wealth. So - the Dallas Opera decides to go without a set - they set up bleachers on stage in which the chorus sat in and watched the action below them. This is one opera that requires an elaborate set. The playbill said something about the “set designer” wanting to say something about the moral of the opera. What a dumbass - everyone hated it – and I made a special trip up there to see it. Terrible.

15

In college, I teched for a reproduction of Cupid and Death, a sixteenth century court masque. All I’m saying, is there’s a reason there was a 400 year lag before the revival of this little gem.

In an effort to replicate the original tools and techniques, we had to lower in a greek god on a throne. The throne was lowered by concealed front and back ropes. In the middle of an entrance, the back rope snagged. The front one didn’t. We ended up trying to dump out our god from about twenty feet up.

Out of respect for Mercury, I have to say, he hung on like a cat while we untangled the ropes and sorted things out.

That was typical of the disasters that dogged that production…

16

This is really more about bad marketing than anything else, but I think it fits in this thread.

I worked on a show called St. Nicholas a while back. It’s a pretty good show, but it wasn’t really marketed to the right audience. It’s an incredibly vulgar one man one act play about a guy who leaves his normal life and ends up having all sorts of strange things happen to him (meeting vampires, and other stuff. My memory is a bit hazy for this one). It has nothing to do with jolly old St Nick, that’s for sure.

We had church youth groups coming to the show. People brought their kids. At least 30% of the audience would walk out every night during the show. People who would have enjoyed the show had no idea it was playing. What a mess.

17

When I was in high school I volunteered for a children’s theater group. I can tell you every imaginable horror story, often involving me personally.

But let’s move it up one level, to high school theater.

There’s a scene in “On Borrowed Time” where the main character is supposed to shoot his sister in law. The director didn’t want untrained actors firing guns on stage, so she had a stagehand with a pistol loaded with blanks backstage. Only problem was, he’d forgotten to cock the trigger, so at the critical moment, the character fired, the sister-in-law collapsed and all you heard was “click.”

A production of “Kiss Me Kate” where one of the thugs (who sang “Brush up Your Shakespeare”) are supposed to shoot a bird that somehow got into the theater. It’s a scene that is often cut from the script, because it’s basically a piece of comic filler – for those who don’t mind shooting birds. The director left it in. This time the gun did fire, but the bird didn’t fall. The prop manager had thoughtfully loaded the gun with two blanks, in case of a misfire. The bird still didn’t fall. In total exasporation, Thug #1 said “Gimme da knife!”

St. Louis has a large outdoor theater for summer productions. I was watching a midweek performance of “West Side Story” starring Barry Williams (aka Greg Brady). Sadly, the heat and humidity had taken its toll of the cast and Mr. Williams couldn’t even croak his lines, much less sing.

Finally, I saw an out-of-town tryout of a play starring Carol Channing and Mary Martin – I’ve blocked the title from my mind. Channing and Martin were, shall we say, well past their prime, the other actors mugged their way through the show, the script was awful and only a momentary vamp by Mary Martin (she had to look at her feet for some reason) showed me that there was ever even a flicker of talent in the entire company, much less that I was watching two of the most famous performers in American theater.

18

I was doing long-term subbing at a sort-of inner city HS. The drama dept. put on “Much Ado About Nothing”, complete with full songs from the movie. It was horribly staged and acted, and that audience acted like they were at a baseball game, opening chip bags and talking to each other.

We left at intermission. Even the kids the next day agreed that it was bad. One of them was even in the production, but said that the drama teacher didn’t seem to care that many of the actors didn’t seem to care.

19

Three spring immediately to mind. Curiously enough, they all involve the same artistic director.

The Country Wife with the mayor of the small town we were in cast as the male lead. I swear the guy had some sort of mental handicap. However, it was mildly interesting listening each night to see how the rest of the cast would manage to fit in all the plot details from the five or six pages of dialogue that he would inevitably skip. I was the stage manager and wound up calling the show from backstage so I could give this dummy his lines. That was fun.

Witness for the Prosecution with the artistic director’s husband cast as the male lead, despite the fact he couldn’t act his way out of a wet paper bag. He was yet another with the inability to learn his lines, and it got to the point where he would call “line” and I could give it to him from memory whilst preparing for a scene change. Worst part was this was professional theatre.

But the worst, the ultimate worst, was Juno and the Paycock. This one sticks in my memory because it was when I heard the artistic director say the stupidest thing ever. EVER! At one point, one of the characters has to carry off a phonograph. We had gotten the library to lend us one that was a) real and b) very nearly the right period. Problem was the actress couldn’t carry it off all in once piece. When she asked the artistic director what do to, the woman commented “but that’s how they do it in the movie!”
Yes, that’s right folks. The moment it was confirmed for me. She would watch the movie version of the plays she chose, and then reproduced them. Two years later, she told me not to bother to audition for Sound of Music because I didn’t look very much like Julie Andrews.

You know, I don’t miss her at all.

20

I’ve got another one actually its four in one.

We had a four night stand in a mid-sized town in the midwest with “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.” We had been on the road about a month so the show was tight and we were not ragged yet. Actually we were at a pretty good place for a performance.

The theater dated back to the days of Vaudville. It was one of those places with elaborate murals on the ceilings (very faded to be sure) chandaliers, boxes, sconces and by the end of the final performances ghosts.

First night, opening scene has young Molly played by a small teenager dancing around and than sat upon a barrel by her brothers. As I said, we’d done this show for a month and no problems. This night the top of the barrel collapses sending the actress plunging butt first into the barrel scarping her back arms and badly brusing her tailbone. It gets a great laugh, but she’s out of the show for a night and not dancing for a week.

Second night, older Molly in “big brass bed” scene where Molly and her husband “J.J.” Brown do a very funny scene about logically enough a big brass bed. The scene ends with the two of them collapsing on the bed in laughter. When they collapsed onto the bed that second night the bed collapsesd onto them badly bruising the male leads ribs. He was out for two nights, not dancing for a week.

The next day we all double checked all props and set pieces. Everything seemed OK.

That night we were at it again and everything seemed to be going well until we pull the act curtain to open for the second act. The beam supporting the act curtain (about four feet across) cracks, splinters and sags half way to the stage. We finish the show way upstage of the curtain. Needless to say all scene changes were done without using the act curtain.

Fourth night - we were all dreading it, but we had all survived all the rest so we were saying what can go wrong now? We’ll make this. About half way into the second act the lights went out. There was a storm down the valley from the town we were in and knocked out the lights to the town. And as I said, this was one of those old theaters so the dressing rooms were up the side of the wall back stage with dangerous balconies and deadly staircase/ladders to get to the different levels. We found some flashlights and got the people in those out. (we had used the old show business tradition of, the smaller the part, the further from the stage your dressing room. Some chorus kids knew they would never get down.) After a pretty long wait, a bunch of people in the audience got flash lights from their cars and we continued on with that, a bit later the fire department showed up with a generator and emergency lights to give us some more light to act and dance with and we finished the show. And honestly, I cannot remember many better ovations following a show. They were a great audience, but we left that town off our itinerary the next year.

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