Summer Schlock Rip Off

Saw the excellent production of Cabaret at Ogunquit Playhouse with Andrea Mcardle this summer. A story about it appeared in Playbill last month and it said that the new revival version was licensed solely to them for this special production, but then last night I saw an awful production of the show at the Mason Street Warehouse in Michigan and they totally stole the entire concept and even most of the staging and worst of all it was done so poorly.

Can they do this? How do amateur theatre companies like this one can access the rights to these new revival versions? I bring this up because its mentioned indirectly in the Fosse thread.

Where in Michigan is the Mason Street Warehouse? I grew up in MI and have never heard of it!

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Here in the New York area, I know there was a high school production of Cabaret this past season that totally ripped off the 1998 revival--I saw both a live medley of songs and a short video clip, and everything, from the costumes to the set to Alan Cumming's voice, was lifted from the revival. I'll give them credit, they did it very well (the Kit Kat Girls had such a wonderfully whorish lack of self-consciousness, they could have done the Broadway production). But it was weird to see what looked like such a Xeroxed copy of the revival, and now that I read this thread, I question the legality of the whole thing.

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mason street warehouse uses college and high school kids in thier shows, clearly you can call them whatever you want, but I would hardly call that professional!!!

their shows were cool a few year ago, but now they have sadly given in to the mundane world of summer stock cheese whiz!!

such a shame!!