Worst show YOU HAVE BEEN IN?- Page 3

[JohnPopa]

Posted: 12/7/04 at 10:52am

I did the show 'Personals,' not only is it god awful material, no one really wanted to be there.

Honestly, there were ensemble lyrics I never actually got right because I never bothered to try and learn them.

Audiences liked it, though.

Poor saps.

[Belle-arina]

Posted: 12/7/04 at 10:57am

jacobtsf : You're going to love this one:

A few years ago I played Cinderella in "A Tale of Cinderella" which was a not-so-well-known version set in Italy. It's actually a pretty good show. The music is catchy and they do some interesting things with the story line.

BUT....our director had to back out right after casting, so they had to find a new one ASAP. This new "director" (yes, the quotation marks are required), decided that she new better than the writer and composer and RE-WROTE THE SHOW. THE WHOLE SHOW! She wanted it geared more towards children, so she cut an hour out of the show (which inlcuded about 5 of my songs, that she thought were just too "assertive" for Cinderella). She took out every song that had Cinderella belting (becuase Cinderella would NOT belt). She re-wrote the script and made it HORRIBLY sappy--I actually had to say the line "Papa, I think I'm REALLY in love!" She also made Cinderella stupid: In the original the Prince and Cinderella meet before the ball, but he's wearing a mask to disguise himself, and she's all dirty, and that's why they don't know each other. She thought the mask part was stupid, so she eliminated it, so basically, Cinderella just didn't recognize him in a different outfit. :) I tried to inform the Production manager that what she was doing was illegal, but everyone kind of took the attitude of "who's going to know." I almost quit several times, but other people involved assured me that if we were to get caught I wouldn't be the one getting in trouble. Anyway, the children loved the show, but it was really annoying to be playing a character that originally had so much depth, and would up being a vacuous damsel in distress who gets taken advantage of until she's rescued by the handsome prince.

[leomaxfrank]

Posted: 12/7/04 at 2:07pm

repeat post..

Updated On: 12/7/04 at 02:07 PM

[leomaxfrank]

Posted: 12/7/04 at 2:07pm

worst show itself - not production - was Something's Afoot at my college. The cast was fine but the material is just an absolute mess. I played Nigel - damn shame of a show.

[silvercloud9]

Posted: 12/7/04 at 2:09pm

definintely Bye Bye Birdie...I hate that show now

[timote316]

Posted: 12/7/04 at 2:16pm

My senior year drama, Gramercy Ghost.

Only one of the leads knew his lines 100%, one hardly knew any. I totally messed up one of my scenes. My costume was terrible (just put it this way: I was a "woodsie". Imagine my costume). The direction was awful. Casting wasn't too good. The best part of the production was when someone tripped over the set and the fireplace almost fell over. There was a good 2 minute break in the show because everyone on stage was laughing so hard.

*sigh* Memories...

Posted: 12/7/04 at 2:29pm

This is a no brainer:

Met a guy who knew I did theater and he put me in his original musical "Killing Time Before Carnegie Hall." I was so thrilled to be asked to do something original (and let's face it, I was crushing on him at the time) that I made the commitment not really knowing much about the show. BIG MISTAKE.

It was basically a showcase for him and his obsession with opera, which he really was not that good at singing. I knew it was a certified disaster after about 2 rehearsals, but I had committed to do it. Our first booking was a cabaret club for a group of gays fresh off a harbor cruise and stinkin' drunk. It went way over their heads, and by the 3rd number they stopped paying attention and just payed for more booze, chatting loudly amongst themselves. Writer/director/star freaked out, began screaming at the audience ("Bourgeois pigs" was one of his rants) and closed the curtain, collapsed in hysterics and that was that. I never spoke to him again, and the crush was crushed in an instant.

Nothing like opening and closing a show during the First Act!

[Idina's BIGGEST fan]

Posted: 12/7/04 at 2:47pm

Return of the Glass Slipper....worst show ever...plsu i'm stuck being cinderella with the prince being a guy i dont like at all! hope none of you ever have to do it....

[LilElphaba]

Posted: 12/7/04 at 2:52pm

lol Heather, but thats just a little mini show. I havent done any bad shows. They were all fun...wait....exept 1 year in camp we HAD to do pinocchio (spelling is bad). But one of the best we did was FAME!

[jacobtsf]

Posted: 12/7/04 at 4:47pm

Belle-arina -At first I thought I would like it because it is Cinderella(see my fan photos) but than I read it and...

BE GLAD YOU WEREN"T CAUGHT(everyone gets in trouble)

Updated On: 12/7/04 at 04:47 PM

[AbsolutKnight]

Posted: 12/7/04 at 4:53pm

Camelot when I was in college. It just seemed sooooo long and boring for a college production.

[musicalfandukie]

Posted: 12/7/04 at 5:05pm

Unsinkable Molly Brown i was in the 11th grade in high school i had a feeling the show was going to be horrible when the best girl that auditioned was told she couldn't play molly cause she was black. She didn't except the other part she was offered and i don't blame her. Only 20 people auditioned for a cast that is suppose to be like 40 so people were doubling and trippling for parts. Most of the cast was full of non singers and almost all freshman except me so the chorus numbers were horrible to sit through. There was also lots of drama back stage i was being stalked by a crazy girl cause i turned her down when she asked me to go to prom. so everyday she would leave me letters that said some pretty odd things. In the end we had an audiance of about 20 people that showed up.lol and the director got fired and never was heard from again..lol good times!

[Racetrack]

Posted: 12/7/04 at 11:49pm

5th grade version of The Scottish play. Good director, but really bad actors. A friend of mine who is an actor/opera singer saw it and told us how wonderful we did, but not thinking back he lied. Lol.

[The Distinctive Baritone]

Posted: 12/8/04 at 12:13am

Reading these posts, it's amazing how one can turn a good script into a bad show, or a bad script into a good show.

For example, right now I'm performing in Kurt Vonnegut's "Happy Birthday Wanda June," a mediocre play that flopped on Broadway in the seventies. However, the director and designers were great and the cast is really strong, and the show's a hit.

The worst production of anything I've done was probably "The Pajama Game" in high school. We just butchered it. In college, I did a pretty good production of this old English comedy called "Trelawny of the Wells." However, although the show might have been funny a hundred years ago in England, in our modern America, audiences were very bored.

[Belle-arina]

Posted: 12/8/04 at 10:13am

jacobtsf: "Everyone gets in trouble."

REALLY? Those liars! They promised me I wouldn't be implicated! Good thing we didn't get caught then--the real writers would have had complete heart attacks upon viewing what their show had become!

By the way, I love your picture--what version of Cinderella did you do?

[Mister Matt]

Posted: 12/8/04 at 10:53am

You can say "Macbeth" here. This is not a theatre. It is not be spoken aloud. And it's actually a very silly superstition.

[LoringsGuy]

Posted: 12/8/04 at 11:15am

I was in a play in college called TRIC-TRAC, a post-apocolyptic "Waiting for Godot"-esque tale, written by some allegedly renowned South American playwright, that had never been performed in the U.S. In fact, it hadn't even been translated into English before, so our director did it herself. There were eight of us and we wore tight body suits with hoods, each in a different color of the rainbow. I thought we looked like Skittles. The stage was more or less bare except for a jungle gym set. I don't recall much about the show anymore except that at the end we all stood staring out blankly at the audience, saying over and over again, "Tric-Trac....Tric-Trac...Tric-Trac...." The audience was so completely baffled, they couldn't even tell if it was the end of the show, and there would be this light smattering of applause as the house lights came up. It was like a parody of bad experimental theatre. We did get a telegram from the playwright on opening night, congratulating us and wishing us well, which was nice, but we were all incredibly embarrassed to be a part of it. My grandfather, bless his heart, actually said he liked it.

[Racetrack]

Posted: 12/8/04 at 11:30am

I know I just didn't want everyone to go apes**t because I said it. I agree it's a very silly superstition. Still probably worst play I've done at least that I can think of.

[Gypsy2]

Posted: 12/8/04 at 2:42pm

I did fiddler in 7th grade, and there were literally 3 ensemble members in the anatevka number. Everyone missed the cues, nobody knew the words, and all the leads stank. Then again it was 7th grade, but it could have been better. *shrug*

[jacobtsf]

Posted: 12/8/04 at 3:57pm

"By the way, I love your picture--what version of Cinderella did you do?"
I'm not quite sure which version it was-all I know is that the fairy-godmother was written to be Irish and that Cinderella had a dog named Rover whom the godmother cast a spell on to talk.
Wierd script but the music was great and it was a hit.

[~*Triple Star On Broadway*~]

Posted: 12/8/04 at 7:08pm

My senior year in highschool, I played ANNIE in ANNIE. 'Nuf said.

[SallyBrown]

Posted: 12/8/04 at 7:17pm

well when I played Annie in Annie..which by the way i really enjoyed, it was an outdoor theatre, and it rained on my last night

[Candleshoe2]

Posted: 12/8/04 at 7:36pm

I heard of a cast of "The Music Man" that had a mostly girl cast including a female Harold Hill. At the end of the "Till There was You" scene, Marion and Harold just started dancing. It just sounds really bad!

[Candleshoe2]

Posted: 12/8/04 at 7:36pm

I heard of a cast of "The Music Man" that had a mostly girl cast including a female Harold Hill. At the end of the "Till There was You" scene, Marion and Harold just started dancing. It just sounds really bad!

[QuiteSo]

Posted: 12/11/04 at 3:55pm

This year, I was in (wait for it...wait for it...) Night of the Living Dead. Dear lord, it was horrible. The writing, the acting....it was bad. I was "Karen Cooper" - I don't know if any of you saw the movie, so, in essence I was a little girl who had been bitten by a zombie and was unconscious most of the time. My one line, before we added more, was "I hurt." The stage was so cold, I was freezing all the time.

But I did get to kill my mother with a masonry trowel, that was kind of cool. Though it made no sense - the script didn't say when I died or whatever, so I got up and was randomly a zombie.

Our finale was kind of funny, though. We decided to use "Thriller" by Michael Jackson (of course) during the bows...and before the bows, we danced. And though it was cheese to the extreme, it was a hell of a lot of fun.

Updated On: 6/15/05 at 03:55 PM