You Know It's Community Theatre When... — Page 14

... into the woods is expanded to include "other fairy tale characters" including Shrek

I swear to god and all that is holy, I was in that production. (And it gets worse: the kid playing Shrek was wearing a costume recycled from How the Grinch Stole Christmas.)

*You practice in a hallway until the day of the performance.
*You bring your own costumes.
*No one wants to wear the make-up that the director wants them to wear.
*You have no understudies.
*An actor forgets all of his lines or forgets to go onstage for a scene and you end up performing a monologue.
*You think that you aren't allowed to go into the dressing room unless you have a costume change.
*You have one stagehand, and he has no clue what he's doing.
*People yell at you because they think you'll be late for your next entrance...when you still have five minutes.

All of these have happened in shows I've been in.

from hands down the worst production of A Chorus Line I ever saw.

- the girl playing Diana has no accent and doesn't look anything hispanic.
- the girl playing Connie isn't Asian and is about 5'6".
- the girl playing Maggie can't sing and her entire part in "At The Ballet" is turned into a monologue.
- the boy playing Zach is about 15 years old.
- all the costumes were updated for the time period(this was 1996).
- the only dancing consisted of 5 minutes in the opening and about 2 minutes for the finale.
- Cassie's dance solo gets cut.
- if the cast didn't have any lines coming up they would randomly walk off stage.

sadly i had to be honest with my friend who was in it and tell her it was bad, which she agreed with.

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- when your costume is atrached by glue and when the piece comes on the costume lady brings a glue from backstage and sticks it on while your rehearsing.

-when people are bragging that they are better singers than you but they really suck

-when people think they know everthing about show biz

-when all the people with lead roles has a weird way of singing

-when your monkey costume is just a sweatshirt from the show that is inside-out with furry fabric glue on there

Updated On: 3/8/09 at 03:28 PM

When the guy playing Motel the Tailor in "Fiddler" is well into his 40s.

...a production of Anything Goes;
-casts a Billy Lawlor that can't dance, or act and barely hits the right notes
- features a total of 3 sets functioning poorly as all the settings of the show
- 2 out of those 3 sets are small platforms which take 7 minutes to be rolled on by no less than 14 crew members
- the title song starts with Reno alone on stage until the chorus literally runs onto the stage to dance

... The Entire Stage crew gets a curtain call
... the director thinks its a good idea to shove the orchestra down as far to the right as possible for the benefit of a single character entrance
... Sandy in Annie has to wear a leash in all scenes because the dog was borrowed and isn't remotely trained
... There are 7 understudies for each lead
... multi-Character roles are spread to as many people as possible
... Little Shop of Horrors is done with an all white cast
... A lighting designer is credited when the lighting design consists only of "Everything, Blue, and Off"
... the mics used are set to cell phone frequencies
... even the simplest set decorations (life preservers) are painted plywood
... dance numbers look like they would be wonderful if they weren't done in quarter tempo for safety

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When a news team does a story on your theatre company because for their current show they have a cast of 90. But what the news team doesn't know is 90 is pretty small for your theatre company and that they have had a cast of 120 before. And that same show with a cast of 90 was written for six characters and was expanded so that there was four different chorus groups, each with unique names, and about twenty seperate solos. Believe it or not it turned out well!

...When the overture is just the cast recording being pumped through the sound system. I saw a regional production of West Side Story where they did just that, but the rest of the music was live. The only explanation I could come up with was that maybe they didn't get sheet music for the actual overture?

In The Music Man, the role of Harold Hill alternates every other night. The first night, he is played by a 75 year old man, and the second night by a 20 year old woman.

*The director allows people that aren't in the cast or crew to watch rehearsal.
*Most of the cast calls a script a 'play book'.
*You are the only person to exit out the stage door, as everyone else exits by jumping off the stage in costume to go say hello to their parents in the house.
*A cast member doesn't memorize their lines until the last dress rehearsal.

I experienced all of those this past month in a production of a play that I was in.

You do Annie Get Your Gun and Frank Butler accidentally skips the entire song, "Anything You Can Do."

Wait, never mind. That wasn't community theatre.

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When for an extra $5 you get to go to a cast party at the KFC down the street and only the techies show up (not a joke)

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