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

Cafe Society
21

A few years ago I had the great misfortune of seeing a performance of Driving Miss Daisy at a historically black college in Georgia. The theater directory had intentionally cast an all black cast, and Miss Daisy and other white characters were delineated with white-face. It was just spectacularly-abysmal. (Most plays don’t suffer from interracial casting, but that’s one to which race is fairly important, plus white-face make-up on black actors is no less offensive than whites in black-face.)

I’ve seen too many really bad college plays to even begin to list. One of my greatest pet peeves is the overuse and misuse of British accents: the most annoying aspects is that the actors onstage tend to think that any snobby, foreign or grandiloquent character is helped by an obviously fake upper-crust British accent that comes and goes throughout the performance, or if the play is a British play you’ll have three actors speaking in a sorta kinda Received Pronunciation, two speaking with a really bad Cambridge acccent, one with an Irish brogue, one with a Cockney accent and two who aren’t trying at all even though they’re all supposed to have the same general accent.

Then again, I saw a college production of MY FAIR LADY in which Henry Higgins had a Southern accent. That’s one you’ll remember.

22

Sophomore year in high school, I was in the pit for George M!, also known as the worst musical ever. Our George was a guy whose only previous stage experience was MCing the junior variety show. He had a decent voice, but could not grasp the concept of singing at something resembling the tempo the pit’s playing at. That was loads of fun. Loads. We had to make a bunch of weird cuts in one song because the guys in the chorus couldn’t sing high enough. The director added in a few random times where people from the band would go onstage and play, just because he wanted to involve the band more (he was the director.) I was very glad I had made the pit, because the stage band people had to do some really embarrassing things.

23

When I was taking an Intro to Theater class at a small private college in the Upper Midwest, we went to see shows at a wide variety of theaters, from the Guthrie to the Theater Garage (near the U. of Minn., if I recall correctly). A couple of times, we went to see shows at the other small private college in our little cow and college town. (Enough hints?)

This particular college had a theater-in-the-round stage, but their theater department never used it as such, as far as I could tell. They partitioned off half of the theater, making a serviceable (but kind of small) thrust stage. I saw one or two really good shows there. I also saw two musicals – and herein begins my tale.

Apparently, their musical director had become enamored with large wooden box-type platforms. This makes a kind of sense, giving the stage different levels and so forth, but when I have seen this technique done before, the box platforms were either permanent parts of the scenery, or on wheels (that could be locked, of course). This guy had the stagehands pushing and pulling these things across the stage without benefit of wheels. Some were small enough that they could carry them; one was about six yards long, three yards deep, and maybe four feet high…

That show was Chess, which is a problematic show to begin with (if you look at the Broadway cast album, you’ll see a disclaimer that says, "The producers wish to inform you that some lyrics were changed without the approval (read: in spite of the wishes) of Tim Rice). The college theater director mixed elements from the London (original) production and the (heavily revised) American version, resulting in a rather uneven plot. That, plus the long scene change times due to moving big platforms and then placing scene elements, furniture, etc. on them made this thing really hellish to sit through. The really sad thing was, when these big platforms were on stage, they only used the platform! There was nothing going on anywhere else on the stage, which kind of destroys my point about giving the stage different levels.

The other musical I saw there was Pippin. Again, platforms everywhere. However the scene changes didn’t take as much time because the set design was fairly minimal. The director still didn’t do much with using the whole stage at once, though.

At the end of Pippin, there is a great moment where everything is removed from the stage – props, the set, drops, flats, everything. This is done very quickly, in order to emphasize the point that all of Pippin’s illusions have suddenly been stripped away.This production ruined the impact of the moment because they took all of the platforms apart! Being that these were fairly sturdy things, it took over five minutes! Way to kill the momentum, and the moment.

24

One more thing. A request to high schools and colleges considering producing musical theater: If you don’t have a pit band capable of playing the music, don’t do the musical!

One time a friend of mine and I went to our HS alma mater to see the fall musical, Anything Goes. (My kid sister was on the light crew, and talked me into seeing it. Turns out that she just wanted me to see it so I could understand what she was complaining about.) My buddy had just recently played in the pit band of a good college production of Anything Goes, but I didn’t tell him that that was what we were going to see. It wasn’t until after the overture and into the show proper that he realized. "My god…is this supposed to be Anything Goes?! Afterwards, the nicest thing he could say was, “That band wasn’t really…tight, were they?”

The director also couldn’t be bothered to find out the actual official changed lyric for the “Some get their kicks from cocaine” line. And the torch singer role was played by a girl who sparked no heat whatsoever – although the “band” didn’t help.

25

I saw Dance of the Vampire on Broadway. With Michael Crawford. Nuff said!

26

I’ll bet it was better than Roswell - the opera. It was a lot worse than you can imagine.

27

My son has been doing pit work for two years now, so I get to speak up for the pit.

First, directors seldom understand that they’re doing musical theater, which means involving the musicians as much as the cast - or even the crew. The director at my son’s school doesn’t even call the orchestra in until the last week of rehearsal to work with the company. No matter how good the individual musicians are, or how much they’ve rehearsed together, that doesn’t leave a lot of time to work out the timing, cues, etc.

Also, the pit is called that for a reason. In my son’s school (and we have a new performing arts center) the pit is accessible through a trap door at the foot of the stage. Obviously, you’ll want the trap door open during the performance, which means the pit crew has a continuous stream of dirt, small props, etc. raining down on them from errant kicks by the cast and crew. It’s hot and stuffy down there. In the last production, the pianist had to keep finding a corner to hurl in because she was so sick.

Don’t blame the pit - pity the pit.

28

OMG, I also saw Dance of the Vampires! It was the Saturday night before closing and everyone, esp. Michael who ruined the show but was a good sport about it, just went balls-out, wild campy. The terrific Rene Auberjiunois, as always, tried to hold the whole damn mess together. But it was hopeless and the kind of musical where every other song ended with what Forbidden Broadway brands as The Evita Pose: the singer standing downstage, alone, arms up and above their heads, hands forward, belting at the top of their lungs.

And now…“Tuuuugboat, Tuuuugboat…”

Amyone else see Thou Shalt Not? It was a big musical re-telling of Balzac’s Therese Raquin, but they updated the prim Victorian-era repressed French society setting to something a bit more musical–post-WWII New Orleans. A totally different society with totally different morals and outlook (so she had an affair with her husband’s best friend, so what? Everyone else was boozing it up and the women were all dressed like ballerina cooch dancers). It didn’t help that the lead female couldn’t sing or act, although she was a fantastic dancer. Craig Bierko, a charismatic singer and great leading man, couldn’t do anything with the lead woman and had more chemistry with the nice old actress playing her mom. The show was totally stolen by the guy playing the Camille role, the cuckolded and murdered husband, a mischevious little blond imp called Norbert Leo Butz (currently onstage in Wicked), who had the only good songs as the ghost after he was killed.

It was heavily hyped, like DOTV, and flopped like a beached whale. And the Tugboat song (a lullaby sung by ‘Therese’ during the drowning scene) was all you needed to hum in musical theater circles for the next year to make the listener dissolve in giggles. Both these productions have their posters in places of honor on the walls of Joe Allen’s, a famed Theatre Row bistro on 46th that decorates its walls with posters of flops.

29

One more.

I was touring with Oklahoma in Kansas some place and we were doing our freebe production for senior citizens homes, orphanages, sheltered workshops and the like. It was good PR and it gave the local papers a chance to review us before we began commercial performances and it gave us a chance to get used to the facility before paying customers hit the seats.

I was playing Judd and was in the process of attacking the female lead at the climax of the play when from the back of the house comes, “I’ll save you!”

I look up and see a very large man in bibbed overalls with a childlike look of determination on his face running down the aisle coming straight for me. Clearly he was retarded and equally clearly he was taking the play very seriously. I was like the proverbial deer in the headlights. I froze breaking the fourth wall rather badly, watching probable serious injury come running down the aisle straight at me.

What saved me was that the man did not realize that there was a pit between him and me. He plunged into the pit just missing one of the guys doing the percussions and knocking himself somewhat senseless. When he was brought around he was taken to the lobby and we continued the show, although the climax lost some of its punch.

TV

30

I will cheerfully admit that these things should be judged on a case-by-case basis. I understand that in many cases, the director doesn’t know how to do musical theater, and it’s because of that that the music sucks. However, I still say that in many cases (especially in HS) the pit band just isn’t that good. (In the case of the specific production of Anything Goes that I was talking about, both of these conditions were true. It made for a…memorable…evening)

I still stand by my statement that if the pit can’t do it – no matter whether it’s because they aren’t up to it or because the director is clueless – then they shouldn’t do the show. Or at least postpone it…