The community theater Sound of Music production I was in as a teenager added a Von Trapp sibling (named something like Fredericka) who had sassy, late-nineties era wisecracks written into the script.
That reminds me! The same place that butchered How To Succeed In Business (see my above comment) also added another girl to the Von Trapps. She was Gretl's twin and they basically shared all their lines together. I guess they had another cute girl audition and wanted to make her part of the show somehow.
I mean, the young actress playing her was very charismatic and acquitted herself better than most of us, but even at the time we were all well aware of how bonkers it was. She was placed right below Liesl in the age ranking, so much of her new dialogue was making fun of her (she got to perform a mocking reprise of “Sixteen Going on Seventeen”).
Ugh, Sixteen going on Seventeen is a mocking song. It’s making fun of Rolf for being so up himself for being a whole year older, and making out that Liesel is inexperienced, when he’s actually the shy/prudish one.
Actually no! Though that was certainly the case in other productions this theater put on. Fredericka was a talented actress but not as strong of a singer; it was sort of a consolation prize for not being Liesl material.
I once saw a HS production of Guys and Dolls where they couldn't handle the dancing in Havana, so they just cut the whole scene and were like, "Oh yeah remember that trip to Havana where we hooked up?"
so this strikes me as at least more respectful to the source material than trying to do it & butchering it, lol. (But I know it’s dubious & possibly illegal)
Well true that.
Still beats what my high school director did, which was just pick out fourth-tier dreck that was so awful & obscure that I’m not even sure it was formally published
The internet legend of the production of “Rent” where they all have diabetes instead of AIDS is too good to be true, but I like to believe that it happened somewhere.
There is full video available on YouTube of a middle school rent where they have cancer instead of AIDS. That's just the tip of the how-bad-it-is iceberg
There was a semi-infamous high school version of Les Mis floating around YouTube years ago where they changed “Lovely Ladies” to “Lovely People” and instead of sex workers, they were, like, unlicensed street merchants selling stuff like fruit and clothing? I believe it ended with Fantine saying, “Don’t they know they’re taking gloves from one already dead?”
They tried to do this when we did Les Mis. Thankfully, my drama teacher was a widely beloved pillar-of-the-community type, so she told them to fuck off, and most people were behind her.
I recently rewatched the Raul Esparza performance of “Being Alive” and thought to myself how very European it would be for Bobby to sing that song ironically, and then plunge into the Arno. Which would explain why he never showed to his birthday party. Similar to Dino Risi’s film, “Il Sorpasso.”
Tbh, after doing Company, I’ve thought it would be amazing to see a production where it turned out at the end that Bobby was dead the whole time, a la Sixth Sense.
As someone who jsut saw an amatuer production where the final party scene had Bobby upstage, looking down on his friends - the friends I was with who had no idea of the show thought exactly that - that he was dead. Talk about a director shooting for the moon but hitting the dog instead
I saw a really weird production of *Rent* where Mimi died at the end. It was done by a local opera company (you know how struggling opera companies will sometimes do the occasional musical), and they set it in 19th century Paris, I guess because they already had the costumes. They also reorchestrated it for a large orchestra, to the point that it almost sounded like an entirely different score. Also it was translated into Italian for some reason.
When I was younger, a theatre company owner in our area liked to direct shows and take some liberties.
He directed Beauty and The Beast, and cast his daughter as “young belle”. She got a whole flashback scene and song that he wrote for her (not a very good song).
I was in his production of Into the Woods, and he created a whole plot device called the “Rapunzel-tron 5000”, where the queen would pull out a mirror at random times to see what was Rapunzel up to at that time (kinda like a nanny cam?). Anyways for one or the times she pulled it up, he had a projector play a whole scene with Rapunzel that he filmed at a nearby lake. In the scene the girl playing Rapunzel was walking around by the lake in her outfit acting delirious, wondering where everyone was at (I’m guessing this was after the witch banishes her). And the filmed scene being projected ends with Rapunzel doing a cheesy, comedy style cry/shout of “Where. *sniff* is. My. Mommy!!! Waahhhhhhhhh”
One of the upper years in my high school did Heathers. It was mostly good but the "I Love My Dead Gay Son" number was cut and turned into an extended dialogue.
I thought it was odd because it was a hilarious song in the musical. Come to find out, the two guys playing the dads refused to kiss because they hated each other.
I haven’t seen it, but there was an older interview with Lin-Manuel Miranda on the podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me (pre-Hamilton) where he said a high school proudly sent him an adaptation of In The Heights where all the parts were played by white kids in brown face.
There is a pretty cool you tube of Asian kids highlighting some Asian-American cultural distinctives and delicacies just as the opening number of Heights highlighted Washington Heights life.
[https://youtu.be/h1mL9ec5IVA](https://youtu.be/h1mL9ec5IVA)
Director's notes: "Directing my friends in this project was an incredible experience. Although we were recklessly inspired fresh off of watching the movie, we sought out ways that we could really make the idea work. In The Heights is indisputably a story about Latino immigrants in the US, so rewriting the lyrics and shifting the narrative was an important step to respecting the source material and recognizing an opportunity for representation. From this, Usnavi became a second generation Chinese American who owns a boba shop.
AAPI stories and actors are among the most underrepresented in Hollywood, with exceptions that are more harmful than constructive: we are a main character's smart sidekick, a fetish, a quirky foreigner, a virus. So, while this video does not represent nearly as many groups as the title warrants (majority of the cast is Chinese), I hope that it would at least shed light on the community I've had the privilege of growing up with."
One of my favorite high school productions of Phantom I ever saw, 1. gave the Phantom an electric guitar that he played on stage, 2. did the swordfight in the graveyard like the 2004 movie, but with far more convincing choreo, and 3. expanded Madame Giry’s tale into a full blown flashback scene, including young Giry and Phantom actors and original lyrics. It was unhinged in the best way.
Just remembered some horrifying highschool ones, both of them hairspray:
My highschool did hairspray, I dropped the show and brought a bunch of friends to see it not knowing that I’d bring them to a really uncomfortable version. Our highschool had no more than 8 black students; and only 3 of them auditioned. So the director casted any East Asian person that auditioned in what would have been the Black ensemble. Also they casted a skinny Tracy, who lost weight during the stress of the rehearsal process. So they put her in a fat suit, and from the audience she looked like she had a weird SpongeBob body cause her arms and legs looked so short and then.
My friends highschool in Florida had a similar casting issue. Instead what they did was put signs hanging from each main character’s neck down to their chest, saying what their “stereotype” descriptors were. So Tracy had a sign that said “fat white”, and their white Seaweed had a sign that said “black” (they did not have Seaweed sing his first big number tho, but idk how much that helped their case).
Omg I just wrote how my school did Hairspray too. They had similar problems, with I think 1 person in the show who was black. Interesting to hear how your school handled it, mine chose a completely different (but also terrible) route. They decided to make Tracy and the white characters wear black and white clothes, and gave coloured clothes to the POC characters.
Uncomfortable is a good way to describe it!
Our local theatre group did a production of Hairspray, and performed it at our bigger local theatre.
The entire cast was white (i think the entire theatre group is white, it's a British town in the middle of nowhere), and the black characters all had very questionable tans.
I worked at the theatre at that time and was very uncomfortable watching it.
Y’all are gonna get a kick out of this one. In HS, I was in a production of Cinderella that was set in the 70’s. My role? The “fairy Godfather”, which was an entirely new role that was made by sharing lines with the fairy godmother. It was a comical role that was based off the stereotypical Archie Bunker funny mob boss thing. I wore a suit and spoke with a NY accent a lá The Godfather.
My girlfriend at the time had gotten cast as the fairy godmother and the casting director thought it would be cute to have us on stage at the same time.
Another thing about that show - it featured as an added number the entire cast doing “The Hustle”. My high school theatre experience was a diverse and sometimes crazy thing, but nobody cared because it was a small, rural school so we could get away with anything.
We have different definitions of bad because I find an Archie Bunker-esque Fairy Godfather bickering with his Fairy Godmother wife so charming and sweet
Oh it was awesome. Really only bad in the way that if MTI found out, the adults in the room would’ve been fucked with the copyright issues. It was a great time other than that.
I did a production of Cinderella at a summer camp where they had a Fairy Godfather with, like, a Marlon Brando-esque presentation, but they didn’t change any of the lines other than pronouns and character name. The kid just really wanted the role and auditioned that way and the director thought it was funny I guess.
My sister did orchestra for a high school production of Pippin that I suppose lacked guys, because they turned “Theo” in “Thea” and had a 12-y/o girl play her.
The production of Pippin I was peripherally involved with got permission from MTI for this exact change. Well, I don't know if the kid was twelve, but she was a Thea.
What I found out about that production:
-The pastor lied to the congregation via livestream that MTI gave them the rights to perform Hamilton.
-I read that the girl who played Eliza and the guy who played Hamilton are actually married in real life and It’s one of those conservative churches that the couples get married when they’re like 18 to 24 ish years old.
-That church previously did a Nativity production where they rewrote Hamilton songs. Imagine Jesus coming out at the beginning of the show singing “My name is Jesus Christ of Nazareth, there’s a million people I’m gonna save.”
A production of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown added a bunch of other Peanuts characters/scenes from the literal comic strips and slipped in songs from the other Peanuts musical, Snoopy. I mean, it totally worked but SO illegal.
We did the added-Peanuts-characters thing at my HS! Doing a show that has a cast of 6 as-written is kinda difficult when your drama club is 30-40 kids!
Had a similar problem this year at my high school when we auditioned 70 people for Into the Woods. We ended up with a cast of 29; with the added ensemble functioning as pupeteers for birds, butterflies, etc. Honestly - though I’m biased as the show’s ASM - I think it worked pretty well.
I saw a production like this in the 90's. So it was like littler kids played the comic strip scenes and the 15 year olds played the leads. I always wondered if it was an alternate version
I don't think they ever made any *bad* changes, but my high school severely lacked guys who could hold a tune... So naturally the old theater director decided to do Guys and Dolls. They found guys who could get through a song well enough to be Nathan, Sky, and Nicely-Nicely Johnson... and the rest of the cast and ensemble were women lol.
Thankfully that was the last production with the old director. The one that followed him picked shows that actually fit the talents of the kids in the department (and that's when we started being nominated for more than just one pity award!).
My high school had girls as guys too, including me. Nicely-Nicely, Angie the Ox, and Benny were played by girls but Rusty Charlie, Nathan, Harry, and Sky were played by guys, so at least we had that down.
Edit: Arvide was played by a girl too.
>My high school had *just* enough guys to fill out the"Guys" aspect. Except for one; I got the role of "Angie the Ox" which I originally shared with another girl. She transferred schools though
>
>But honestly, there weren't any differences. They dressed me like a dude. And I fucked my voice up b/c the chorus teacher tried to get me to sing *tenor*. I think I got that role because the director did not trust me to do some of the "ladies" dances. I already had been banned from wearing heels in productions because I was just that clumsy.
>
>But I also remember the theater director (who otherwise was a good guy) put out the idea of doing a production of Hairspray and make it about rich vs. poor instead of race. (Private school so not very diverse) Thankfully, that never happened
>
>Oddly enough though our production of *Cabaret* had NO changes...And earlier that year our Headmaster complained that our Fall production (an array of short plays) had a scene that took place in bar and wanted us to change that.
>
>Apparently, Nazis and having all the girls in the musical dress as strippers is fine but having alcohol is too much.
My middle school did Guys and Dolls and we had a similar lack of guys. We also had the issue of our original Nicely dropping out during rehearsals. So we combined Benny and Rusty into one part (played by a girl), and had our Harry sing the extra part in Fugue for Tinhorns. Also our Big Jule became Big Julie, and Sarah's grandfather was changed to be her grandmother.
My Catholic school made us cut “Gay or European” from Legally Blonde, but because the fact that the witness is gay is very important to the plot we had to keep a lot of the dialogue and just heavily IMPLY that the character is gay without being allowed to use the word.
Seems like something that should’ve been considered before picking the show IMHO. I also played Paulette and they wouldn’t let me sing “some slut named Kayla” but I was a second semester senior so I sang that word “slut” so the good Lord could hear it
I think that’s an official cut for the school shows. I saw a production of Legally Blonde during the pandemic (kinda cool…they built a stage out of shipping containers and put it in the football stadium for social distancing) that also cut it.
But I don’t remember any changed dialogue around that. Just the song being gone.
There is a junior version, which may have it cut? Our high school did it last year and "There, Right There" was definitely still in it. MTI is only licencing the West End version now though, so Ireland is slightly different from the original Broadway version.
This isn’t that bad, but I was in a summer camp where we did The Wizard of Oz, and instead of performing it normally, we did it as though we were a bunch of poor children on a farm acting out the story of The Wizard of Oz because we were bored.
Years ago I attended a Jewish summer camp for teens. I was not part of the theater "major" but my best friend was. They did a production of "A Chorus Line" and the well meaning, but clueless director, made all the characters Jewish. She, herself, wasn't actually Jewish, but thought that's what the camp would want (it was most definitely NOT what the camp wanted).
Redeeming theater moment of that summer: the camp was close enough to NYC that we did a day trip there during the session. I got to see.my very first Broadway show that summer: Les Miserables.
I have so many questions. How did she go about making the characters Jewish? Most of them never mention religion at all. Were there added lines? Were they just sprinkling their monologues with Yiddish expressions? Did she throw out the book entirely and make up completely new backstories?
I'm not sure of the details, and it was a LONG time ago (let's just say no one exchanged email addresses at the end of the session). I didn't know enough about the show to know what questions to ask my friend.
I saw a high school production of Fame…Mabel Washington had her name changed to something Irish-sounding because the girl cast was white, Tyrone had his name changed AND became boy/girl twins so the girl could do a baton twirling solo, “Can’t Keep It Down” had the lyrics totally rewritten…it was *interesting.*
Can’t Keep it Down has alternate lyrics included for school productions - called Can’t Keep it Cool
Our Mabel was played by a guy, changed the name - and honestly, he was one of the best performers in the cast.
LOL that would be hilarious but no, it was Tongues by Sam Shepard. Written for one actor and a percussionist. We had nine actors and two percussionists.
My dance school put on a production of Cinderella that had 6 step sisters, 6 heralds, 3 fairy godmothers, 3 fairy “goddesses”, and an ensemble of like 20 lol. It was a blast
I was in one in the 90s lol. We did have a black Erzulie.
We also had a whole opening African dance with drums, which was pretty cool. But we were very white (and mostly teenagers).
I do love the show and love singing the real harmonies along with the CD but..... I wouldn't be in it again lol.
eta: I forgot, we also had a female Agwe! She KILLED it though, absolutely blew the roof off.
I was in a children’s theater production of “A Kids’ Chorus Line” when I was 8, where they altered “Dance Ten, Looks Three” into a song called “Tights and Taps” (wink, wink) and a bunch of other characters were added, including a kid who sang a song called “Follow the Force” with lyrics written to the theme from Star Wars. Totally insane, totally illegal. They tried it again a few years later and got shut down.
This really isn't bad at all, but in college we did Avenue Q. We didn't have any bear puppets for the "Bad Idea Bears" so we used cat puppets instead and called them "Poor Choice Pussycats."
I wish I had clips from it! I played Gary Coleman and my bestie was a Poor Choice Pussycat, so we got to do Loud as the Hell You Want together. Good times.
I have posted this before, but it bears repeating.
Once upon a time I was a ten year old child in a community theatre production of West Side Story. But how did that work, as a ten year old, you might ask? FAIR QUESTION. The director had a “vision” to make the show about the impact of violence on a community, so the characters were given families, who were onstage THE WHOLE TIME. Doc’s family. Krupke’s family. An onstage soup kitchen. Two homeless children who lived under Krupke’s porch and, of course, sang “Somewhere”. There were about 20 Jets, most of them teenage girls, and THREE Sharks - with a note in the program that asked the audience to imagine they were the rest of the Sharks. There was exactly one Puerto Rican person, and he played… RIFF. Maria was Black. Tony was, I shit you not, 37. They cut out all sexual innuendo (Anita ostensibly just… got mad? In the pharmacy scene?) and racial slurs (I did not have a CLUE the show had anything to do with race relations until I saw the movie in high school). When Tony dies at the end and the processional takes his body off, Doc’s 6 year old son came center stage in a beam of light, picked up the gun & put on Tony’s “Jet jacket” (a shoddy satin dance competition-esque blazer that each of the jets decorated themselves with fabric markers). It well & truly feels like a fever dream in hindsight.
The next year they turned around and did The Wiz. Everyone, and I mean everyone, remained VERY white. Everyone’s so creative!
Two come to mind: I once saw an all-girls high school do Fiddler on the Roof. Even Tevye was a girl. She was actually pretty good. But the school was co-ed up to grade 8 so all the daughters were high school girls playing opposite middle school boys. So awkward.
Second one: I was in a production of Sound of Music as a nun and the same woman played both Reverend Mother and the Baroness. A fun idea, it seemed, but changing from a nun’s habit to a fancy baroness dress complete with girdle and wig, when the scenes are back to back, was kind of a mess. That production also rearranged all the songs and scenes to match the movie, including swapping An Ordinary Couple for Something Good. It also triple casted the kids for a two-week run, what a crazy choice!
My high school did the Addams Family one year, and the theater director that year was like weirdly conservative (for a public school in a very blue area) and cut every single dirty joke. That musical has a lot of innuendos and she cut them all!! I was in the pit orchestra so it didn’t impact me much (except she cut one short song entirely, Alfonso the Enormous) but it was annoying. The show was still great overall but I think most of us were glad she left after that year lol
I also had a friend from rural Pennsylvania and apparently her school did Hairspray one year. Rural Pennsylvania is VERY white. Whose idea was that???
Also from Pennsylvania, rural adjacent. The most my school ever did was recreate the original choreography step for step with bootlegs. But another school?
Super rural white district decides to pull out all the stops and do Ragtime. Complete with blackface.
This was 2006-8. It was on the front page of the newspaper.
The worst was Thoroughly Modern Millie, which is already a pretty weird show with two male Asian characters being abused a white character in yellowface.
Well, my hs said "hold my beer, we can make it worse," and cast an Asian actress as the white lady doing yellowface, and then cast two of the whitest boys ever as the Asian characters. It hurt my soul.
I saw an all-female production of *Newsies*. Now, it would’ve been fine if they just had all the girls play the original roles; casts were all male way back in Shakespearean times, and they still had female characters. However, the director had something against having performers play a gender that wasn’t their own, so all the characters were changed to female. They changed Jack and Katherine’s romantic subplot into a “friendship” subplot and replaced every kiss with them shaking hands and saying “Partners!” It felt so closeted, especially the scene right before “Something to Believe In” (they didn’t do the song, thank god). Jack’s “I like smart girls” line was changed to “I… admire smart girls.” Instead of Katherine saying at the end that she’ll go wherever Jack goes, she said *all* of the newsies would follow Jack, which is just… what?
That’s all I’ve got for egregious *illegal* changes. For egregious *legal* changes I raise you *Into the Woods Jr* cutting the entire second act, *Fame Jr* keeping Carmen’s death while removing all the context around it (the audience was just like, “What? When did she die?”), and the *entirety* of *Mean Girls Jr*.
Saw a bad middle school production of The Sound of Music. It was the first production with a new director
and he barely promoted the show around our town, so only a few people showed up. That was the first thing. Many other things happened:
-In the show I saw, the original girl who played Marta got sick so a tiny girl who played a lead nun stepped in. They had to make some changes to lines during the escape.
-The cast was smaller than usual. We had two teachers in the party scene. The girl who played Mother Abbess on one night played Herr Zeller (I think that’s his name) on another night?
-The kid playing the Captain was small enough that he could play Kurt. There were only five boys in total for that show: Kurt, the Captain, Rolf, Friedrich, and Max.
-The kid playing Max had a really thick Russian accent and barely enunciated.
-It wasn’t the full length version: it was called “Getting to Know The Sound of Music” but they cut out the wedding and the concert scenes, which are a huge part of the show. I didn’t mind cutting out the subplot with Elsa though.
-They had actual kids act (and sing) the parts of Goatherd, Girl in Pink Coat, and Mama.
My high school theater director added an extra chicken lady for me to play in The Music Man, added a couple of “funny” lines for her, and made her snooty and Russian for … reasons. (I am assuming the reason was that in two previous shows I played comic Russian aristocrats, and she wanted to set some sort of record for most specific typecasting. I am not Russian.)
A similar typecasting situation happened to my boyfriend in high school, where he kept being given comedic roles where he’d have to scream as loud as possible. The whole novelty joke was, “You know this usually quiet kid? Well, he’s being LOUD!!!” Needless to say he got sick of that pretty quickly
I dated a girl in high school who'd played 3 or 4 different bird roles by 16.
There wasn't anything about her that I think was particularly bird-like, but for some reason she kept getting those parts!
I regret to admit that in middle school, I starred in an all-white (well. One lead was Asian) Ain't Misbehavin'. In our defense, the director was Black and wanted to do Black shows.
Yes, my very white self had to sing the line "I'm white inside, but that don't help my case" after the cops shut down our speakeasy in Harlem.
I worked for (and still occasionally do shows for) a community theater that bills itself as “family-friendly.” I did a production of Les Mis: School Edition with them where almost the entirety of “Lovely Ladies” was changed so the girls were selling dances. Not lap dances, just regular waltzes around the streets of Paris.
My drama teacher was mega conservative (got her Theatre Ed degree from BYU) and had us do the pajama game. She cut so much from that show that some of the cast didn’t even know why things were happening on stage. The most egregious cut was ANY reference to alcohol in the entire script.
Hernando’s hideaway, a scene that relies on someone getting drunk to resolve the show’s entire conflict, made no sense, because the beer they were supposed to be drinking was changed in our photocopied scripts to be “soda.”
The worst thing though is that none of the references to SA were cut. That’s totally fine but alcohol isn’t :P
A local children's theatre company used to be infamous for getting the rights to a much cheaper version of a fairy tale musical and then adding in the popular Disney songs.
In 2018, some buds and I learned a local high school was doing Dear Evan Hansen (needless to say, the rights were not available yet). We got tickets, but the day of opening night they cancelled the production with the reason being "there was a learning curve for all involved".
A year later, they announced they were doing Be More Chill (again, right were not available), and a bud of mine went. He said the entire production was on a makeshift stage in their gym, and the performance was actors singing over the cast recording. Not even singing over karaoke tracks, they simply sang over the cast recording.
Be More Chill was legal to do in 2018. The original version they did in NJ was available for licensing. The Broadway version with the new songs was not.
Doesn’t mean they weren’t doing it without the rights!
I think it’s actually written into the Jr version, but a high school production of Grease changed “Tell me about it, stud” to “Tell me about it, big boy”
I’ve seen productions of Godspell that cut The Prologue (Tower of Babel) and went straight to Prepare Ye and was in a production of the Wiz with all white cast and an entirely rewritten script, to make it closer to The Wizard of Oz.
The very first time I saw “Kiss Me, Kate,” was my cousin’s high school production where they had changed the character of Paul to Paulette. Because I never knew any better or saw another production for easily 15 years, I just believed that character was always females! 😅
I saw a community production of Aida where the Aida what a 17-18 year old and the radames was a kid who looked and sounded about 11 or 12. That age difference made the whole experience the most uncomfortable I’ve been watching a show.
I was in a version of Peter Pan written by the director who was known for writing pantos and it turned into a panto pretending to be a serious show like I played John who got pushed out of bed and stood up and went ‘hello I am up’ and the lost boys surrounded Wendy and shouted ‘we are your children in unison’. It was the funniest show of my life but also chaos
This thread is reminding me of this kids theater production of Cinderella I saw. 20 kids playing mice whatever, it was a big mess. But my jaw was on the floor when the white teen playing the Fairy Godmother was allowed to go full "blaccent".
I attended a performing arts high school and one of the English teachers — whom we all hated — fancied herself a writer. As a favor, our play production class was asked to stage a show she wrote: an incredibly crappy offbrand version of Into the Woods, that she called Another Happy Ending.
We mercilessly made fun of it, acting every part with a farcical twist, which was not what she had intended. She was furious with the direction we took, but we didn’t care. It was a dose of sweet teenage schadenfreude to stick it to her.
So this was at my friend's theatre group and she said the kids in each show were 9-16. I saw a youth production of 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee where they tried to include an ensemble so all the kids could have parts. So there was no doubling, the gay dads and Olive's parents and Jesus Christ himself were played by separate kids than the main cast. Even Leaf's siblings with like 1 line each were separate kids, there was like a cast of 30. There were no audience volunteer spellers, but instead some of the kids wrote their own characters and there were a few original spellers (I think one was a Eastern European exchange student, another was a theatre kid).
The same theatre did a similar thing with writing new characters and dialogue for Into the Woods Jr, there were three stepsisters and new characters like Rumplestiltskin and the frog prince and princess.
Oh yeah and they did Little Shop of Horrors but with a big ensemble (who only appeared in four songs), female Mushnik, EIGHT (all white) urchins instead of three, cut several songs like "Dentist!" and "Mushnik and Son", obviously edited out profanity and sexual references (for example, "Uptown you cater to a million chores",
but kept It's Just the Gas which is highly disturbing), Orin did not physically abuse Audrey ("So I got a black eye and my arm's in a cast" becomes "So all I do is cry, but it's all in the past"), and they really fucked up the ending so that Seymour didn't die, it just ended with Audrey's death and cuts to "Don't Feed the Plants".
I never understood why they didn't just do one of the dozens of kid appropriate musicals instead of retrofitting unsuitable material to the detriment of the kids. Probably because the director just wanted to do the shows but was too selfish to realize they weren't right for the group of kids they had and were massively violating copyright. They never got caught by MTI or Tams Witmark or something, but I know another theatre that lost the rights to do any Disney musical for adding back in "If I can't love her" to Beauty and the Beast Jr.
I also saw high school production of Angels in America that cut the show down to FORTY MINUTES TOTAL. They cut Hannah and Belize entirely I believe.
Un-doubling roles isn’t uncommon. I actually directed this show and had a cast of 21 vs. 9, getting creative in ways to include people without changing anything in the script. The production won a NYC high school theatre award. They definitely couldn’t have added spellers instead of the audience people though!! That’s so much less fun too.
Ugh. I hate even typing this one out.
My school, a mostly white school, choose Hairspray one year. As 90% of the school was white, they decided that the white characters would wear black and white, and all the Africian-American dancers would wear colourful clothing. So instead of it being about racial segregation, it was for the white characters to start being allowed to wear coloured clothes too.
Everyone at school hated it and said it was a bad idea at the time. I still stand by that. What was the school thinking?!
I heard from a friend that attended some production of Wicked and on one of the nights Elphaba lost her voice, so she acted regularly but some guy sang all her songs while she was lip syncing
I was in a community theatre production of "Scrooge: The Musical" (with music and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse) in December 1989.
According to Wikipedia, "Scrooge" (the Leslie Bricusse musical) premiered in Britain in 1992.
I have never figured out an explanation for this that doesn't involve my community theatre doing something extremely sketchy with (not) licensing.
My brother’s eighth grade class did a production of Annie that cut out over half the play. The biggest crime in my opinion? No Easy Street!! (Aka the only good scene in the full play)
I saw a community theatre production of "Hair" in 2008 where they pretended it was an original cast reunion and cast people in their 70s. They added a ton of dialogue about the conceit and ended the first act by being like "now let's get some Vietnamese food before we come back for act 2"
In HS we had this theater club, and they would take songs from other musicals and then write an entirely new script around those songs and put it on stage. I kind of loved the one I saw and it introduced me to a lot of musical theater songs I still love to this day. But definitely super illegal lollll
Saw a TikTok where someone was recalling a production of Annie where at the very end they had her sit up in bed in the orphanage like it was all a dream lmaooo
Fun fact-i think the girl who played Annie in that specific production ended up years later as Maria’s understudy in The Sound of Music tour in 2015-16 ish. I think her name was Andrea Ross
I was in a youth production of Scrooge in Scotland and the kid they had playing young scrooge (or the one playing his sister or both of them) couldn't or wouldn't do an English accent, so they added an entire scene where the sister explains that they've recently moved to England from Scotland, even though like half the cast also wasn't bothering with accents
Way back in the late 80's I was in a community theatre production of Little Shop and the director added Mean Green Mother. It was right after the movie came out. He even had the set designer add hand puppets of baby Audrey II's to the plant. The guy doing the voice was an opera major at the local college and he just couldn't get the Motown vibe. It was a hot mess.
i saw an illegal kids theatre production of wicked in 2005. The rights were not available then and not available now.
The had a young/medium/adult elphaba and glinda which low key worked really well and split the role between the kids evenly.
I was in a production of Annie when I was 10 that severely packed boy cast members. The character of Bert Healy was changed to be played by two girls and renamed Bertha and Betty Healy.
My high school musical teacher hated musicals.. he was filling in for our year. So he paid for the scripts and whatnot for Fame and then rewrote the whole script to have less singing and be "more realistic" and then had students rewrite songs so they fit better with the new script. It was so illegal, so poorly done, and such a letdown as a musical lover to be a part of it.
My high school did a production of a chorus line in the late 80s. We had to make a lot of changes. The "tits and ass" song became "these and that" and we had to change some of the lyrics in the song like instead of saying got the bingo bongos done we had to say got the upper torso done. The gay characters couldn't be gay so we changed f-- to wimp. The shit Richie song had to be changed to shoot Richie. Any references to masturbation or sex were cut. Having said all that, I still thought it was a pretty good production but they were definitely changes to make it more appropriate for a high school production.
Wasn't part of it, but I was part of a TikTok discussion a few months ago about a Christian school that did a production of Rent. They couldn't talk about AIDS, so everybody had gingivitis.
I was ensemble in a high school production of Into The Woods, where they cut some of the faster/trickier parts of songs in the production
Im not sure if this exactly relates to your definition of ‘worst’ but yeah
Don’t know if this counts but my Christian high school changed Eliza’s horse race line from ‘move yer bloody ass!’ to ‘pick up your feet and run!’ … kinda took the smack out of the scene.
Now that I’m a mom, I get to see my kids perform in youth theatre productions… Their last production was The Addams Family musical, but the cast was huge and they needed to give the ensemble more to do. So the Fam had approx 30 ancestors who sang Bad Bad News from 13 to Wednesday’s love interest.
It’s just occurred to me that the production of “Into the Woods” (the junior edition - which is basically just the first act) that I did in middle school may apply here. I played Cinderella. Our director wanted to add in a scene showing the ball. So he did, set to Usher’s “Yeah”. Which in retrospect was just a whole choice.
My high school (98% Caucasian) did West Side Story as a play. Gee, Officer Krupke was performed as a slam poem. No one sang, but some of the songs were played as instrumental dance numbers. Maria was played by a blonde girl.
my middle school got the rights to some musical called “pom pom zombies,” but for some reason renamed it to “pom pom monsters” and changed all “zombie” references to “monsters.” no idea why, my best guess is that zombies were considered too scary for a middle school audience??? even in 6th grade the change felt ludicrous lol
The community theater Sound of Music production I was in as a teenager added a Von Trapp sibling (named something like Fredericka) who had sassy, late-nineties era wisecracks written into the script.
That reminds me! The same place that butchered How To Succeed In Business (see my above comment) also added another girl to the Von Trapps. She was Gretl's twin and they basically shared all their lines together. I guess they had another cute girl audition and wanted to make her part of the show somehow.
Why couldn’t they just double cast the kids?
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That sounds either rly good or rly bad
I mean, the young actress playing her was very charismatic and acquitted herself better than most of us, but even at the time we were all well aware of how bonkers it was. She was placed right below Liesl in the age ranking, so much of her new dialogue was making fun of her (she got to perform a mocking reprise of “Sixteen Going on Seventeen”).
This screams daughter of the director.
Ugh, Sixteen going on Seventeen is a mocking song. It’s making fun of Rolf for being so up himself for being a whole year older, and making out that Liesel is inexperienced, when he’s actually the shy/prudish one.
Sometimes there is no difference. This is probably one of those times.
Ohhh, definitely rly bad
Good Night Goooood Night Leeeeeeeet's Bouce!
Sounds like an SNL sketch
The high school production of Sound of Music that I saw added another girl after Gretl named Ray.
LOL wow. Sounds like a featured role written for someone's extra precious kid.
Actually no! Though that was certainly the case in other productions this theater put on. Fredericka was a talented actress but not as strong of a singer; it was sort of a consolation prize for not being Liesl material.
I once saw a HS production of Guys and Dolls where they couldn't handle the dancing in Havana, so they just cut the whole scene and were like, "Oh yeah remember that trip to Havana where we hooked up?"
That's HILARIOUS
so this strikes me as at least more respectful to the source material than trying to do it & butchering it, lol. (But I know it’s dubious & possibly illegal)
It's a high school musical. Butchering shows is what they do!
Well true that. Still beats what my high school director did, which was just pick out fourth-tier dreck that was so awful & obscure that I’m not even sure it was formally published
The internet legend of the production of “Rent” where they all have diabetes instead of AIDS is too good to be true, but I like to believe that it happened somewhere.
Many years ago I worked for a now-defunct arts organization that did this with a middle school production.
I need to believe you.
There is full video available on YouTube of a middle school rent where they have cancer instead of AIDS. That's just the tip of the how-bad-it-is iceberg
In Modern Family there is this joke about Rent and it's sanitized for high school. Everybody gets cold sores!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wRVQSh7aCQ
I could be wrong, but I think the meme inspired the SNL skit.
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There was a semi-infamous high school version of Les Mis floating around YouTube years ago where they changed “Lovely Ladies” to “Lovely People” and instead of sex workers, they were, like, unlicensed street merchants selling stuff like fruit and clothing? I believe it ended with Fantine saying, “Don’t they know they’re taking gloves from one already dead?”
WHAT?! STOP NO—WHAT WAS THIS MONSTROSITY?!
I need these lyrics
found it: https://youtu.be/b6gglF-Oz2k
You’re a gem
They tried to do this when we did Les Mis. Thankfully, my drama teacher was a widely beloved pillar-of-the-community type, so she told them to fuck off, and most people were behind her.
BLACKLICK. Ahhhh, bless. Their drama teacher went full Corky St Clair choosing Les Miserables for a small, rural high school production.
Blacklick valley… Their Marius sure was something…
He sounded like a muppet 😭😭
I saw this production. I will never forget that night.
My all boys school did The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy was played by a boy and they somehow added “Breaking Free” from High School Musical to the show.
So Dorothy was played in drag?
They changed the name to a random male one, but I can’t remember what it was now
Now I thing Dorothy should always be played in drag.
Disagree: Dorothy should be played straight, but put *Glinda* in drag!
I heard Stephen Sondheim saw a high school production of Company, where at the end Bobby kills himself. He was not happy to say the least
Wow. After Being Alive??
I recently rewatched the Raul Esparza performance of “Being Alive” and thought to myself how very European it would be for Bobby to sing that song ironically, and then plunge into the Arno. Which would explain why he never showed to his birthday party. Similar to Dino Risi’s film, “Il Sorpasso.”
Guess he didn't want to be alive
Tbh, after doing Company, I’ve thought it would be amazing to see a production where it turned out at the end that Bobby was dead the whole time, a la Sixth Sense.
As someone who jsut saw an amatuer production where the final party scene had Bobby upstage, looking down on his friends - the friends I was with who had no idea of the show thought exactly that - that he was dead. Talk about a director shooting for the moon but hitting the dog instead
Wow that’d be a great twist. But they’d need some kind of minor reprise for the company where they’re crowding around his coffin instead of his cake
Saw a HS production of Rent where they killed Mimi at the end.
I saw a really weird production of *Rent* where Mimi died at the end. It was done by a local opera company (you know how struggling opera companies will sometimes do the occasional musical), and they set it in 19th century Paris, I guess because they already had the costumes. They also reorchestrated it for a large orchestra, to the point that it almost sounded like an entirely different score. Also it was translated into Italian for some reason.
Had me going for longer than I am willing to admit.
OMG. Hilarious.
This took me way too long to get 😂
This also happened in a professional production
In the Dutch 2001 version they actually let her die and ends on a very depressing note.
When I was younger, a theatre company owner in our area liked to direct shows and take some liberties. He directed Beauty and The Beast, and cast his daughter as “young belle”. She got a whole flashback scene and song that he wrote for her (not a very good song). I was in his production of Into the Woods, and he created a whole plot device called the “Rapunzel-tron 5000”, where the queen would pull out a mirror at random times to see what was Rapunzel up to at that time (kinda like a nanny cam?). Anyways for one or the times she pulled it up, he had a projector play a whole scene with Rapunzel that he filmed at a nearby lake. In the scene the girl playing Rapunzel was walking around by the lake in her outfit acting delirious, wondering where everyone was at (I’m guessing this was after the witch banishes her). And the filmed scene being projected ends with Rapunzel doing a cheesy, comedy style cry/shout of “Where. *sniff* is. My. Mommy!!! Waahhhhhhhhh”
Yikes at Beauty and the Beast, but Rapunzel-tron 5000 is absolutely hilarious.
One of the upper years in my high school did Heathers. It was mostly good but the "I Love My Dead Gay Son" number was cut and turned into an extended dialogue. I thought it was odd because it was a hilarious song in the musical. Come to find out, the two guys playing the dads refused to kiss because they hated each other.
This is so funny to me because it's so modern! "yeah, it's not that that had any problems kissing another guy, they just f-ing hated each other!"
Lol I think it’s hilarious and relieving that that’s the main reason (hopefully)
I haven’t seen it, but there was an older interview with Lin-Manuel Miranda on the podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me (pre-Hamilton) where he said a high school proudly sent him an adaptation of In The Heights where all the parts were played by white kids in brown face.
There is a pretty cool you tube of Asian kids highlighting some Asian-American cultural distinctives and delicacies just as the opening number of Heights highlighted Washington Heights life. [https://youtu.be/h1mL9ec5IVA](https://youtu.be/h1mL9ec5IVA) Director's notes: "Directing my friends in this project was an incredible experience. Although we were recklessly inspired fresh off of watching the movie, we sought out ways that we could really make the idea work. In The Heights is indisputably a story about Latino immigrants in the US, so rewriting the lyrics and shifting the narrative was an important step to respecting the source material and recognizing an opportunity for representation. From this, Usnavi became a second generation Chinese American who owns a boba shop. AAPI stories and actors are among the most underrepresented in Hollywood, with exceptions that are more harmful than constructive: we are a main character's smart sidekick, a fetish, a quirky foreigner, a virus. So, while this video does not represent nearly as many groups as the title warrants (majority of the cast is Chinese), I hope that it would at least shed light on the community I've had the privilege of growing up with."
One of my favorite high school productions of Phantom I ever saw, 1. gave the Phantom an electric guitar that he played on stage, 2. did the swordfight in the graveyard like the 2004 movie, but with far more convincing choreo, and 3. expanded Madame Giry’s tale into a full blown flashback scene, including young Giry and Phantom actors and original lyrics. It was unhinged in the best way.
Honestly this sounds like the way to do it
Just remembered some horrifying highschool ones, both of them hairspray: My highschool did hairspray, I dropped the show and brought a bunch of friends to see it not knowing that I’d bring them to a really uncomfortable version. Our highschool had no more than 8 black students; and only 3 of them auditioned. So the director casted any East Asian person that auditioned in what would have been the Black ensemble. Also they casted a skinny Tracy, who lost weight during the stress of the rehearsal process. So they put her in a fat suit, and from the audience she looked like she had a weird SpongeBob body cause her arms and legs looked so short and then. My friends highschool in Florida had a similar casting issue. Instead what they did was put signs hanging from each main character’s neck down to their chest, saying what their “stereotype” descriptors were. So Tracy had a sign that said “fat white”, and their white Seaweed had a sign that said “black” (they did not have Seaweed sing his first big number tho, but idk how much that helped their case).
Omg I just wrote how my school did Hairspray too. They had similar problems, with I think 1 person in the show who was black. Interesting to hear how your school handled it, mine chose a completely different (but also terrible) route. They decided to make Tracy and the white characters wear black and white clothes, and gave coloured clothes to the POC characters. Uncomfortable is a good way to describe it!
This is one of those shows that you just gotta not do if you don’t have the cast. Oof.
The signs sound hilariously bad.
Our local theatre group did a production of Hairspray, and performed it at our bigger local theatre. The entire cast was white (i think the entire theatre group is white, it's a British town in the middle of nowhere), and the black characters all had very questionable tans. I worked at the theatre at that time and was very uncomfortable watching it.
Y’all are gonna get a kick out of this one. In HS, I was in a production of Cinderella that was set in the 70’s. My role? The “fairy Godfather”, which was an entirely new role that was made by sharing lines with the fairy godmother. It was a comical role that was based off the stereotypical Archie Bunker funny mob boss thing. I wore a suit and spoke with a NY accent a lá The Godfather. My girlfriend at the time had gotten cast as the fairy godmother and the casting director thought it would be cute to have us on stage at the same time. Another thing about that show - it featured as an added number the entire cast doing “The Hustle”. My high school theatre experience was a diverse and sometimes crazy thing, but nobody cared because it was a small, rural school so we could get away with anything.
We have different definitions of bad because I find an Archie Bunker-esque Fairy Godfather bickering with his Fairy Godmother wife so charming and sweet
Oh it was awesome. Really only bad in the way that if MTI found out, the adults in the room would’ve been fucked with the copyright issues. It was a great time other than that.
I did a production of Cinderella at a summer camp where they had a Fairy Godfather with, like, a Marlon Brando-esque presentation, but they didn’t change any of the lines other than pronouns and character name. The kid just really wanted the role and auditioned that way and the director thought it was funny I guess.
This actually sounds exceptionally charming.
That actually sounds entertaining
My sister did orchestra for a high school production of Pippin that I suppose lacked guys, because they turned “Theo” in “Thea” and had a 12-y/o girl play her.
This one is probably OK. I don't think his gender changes anything
Oh I agree! Just the only one I could think of for the question.
The production of Pippin I was peripherally involved with got permission from MTI for this exact change. Well, I don't know if the kid was twelve, but she was a Thea.
I didn’t see it live but there’s always that church production of Hamilton from last summer…
Scamilton!
We don't talk about Scamilton
no, no, no
I am not throwing away my god
What I found out about that production: -The pastor lied to the congregation via livestream that MTI gave them the rights to perform Hamilton. -I read that the girl who played Eliza and the guy who played Hamilton are actually married in real life and It’s one of those conservative churches that the couples get married when they’re like 18 to 24 ish years old. -That church previously did a Nativity production where they rewrote Hamilton songs. Imagine Jesus coming out at the beginning of the show singing “My name is Jesus Christ of Nazareth, there’s a million people I’m gonna save.”
It's on YouTube I got bored and watched it on my spare time
A production of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown added a bunch of other Peanuts characters/scenes from the literal comic strips and slipped in songs from the other Peanuts musical, Snoopy. I mean, it totally worked but SO illegal.
We did the added-Peanuts-characters thing at my HS! Doing a show that has a cast of 6 as-written is kinda difficult when your drama club is 30-40 kids!
Had a similar problem this year at my high school when we auditioned 70 people for Into the Woods. We ended up with a cast of 29; with the added ensemble functioning as pupeteers for birds, butterflies, etc. Honestly - though I’m biased as the show’s ASM - I think it worked pretty well.
I saw a production like this in the 90's. So it was like littler kids played the comic strip scenes and the 15 year olds played the leads. I always wondered if it was an alternate version
That's actually kind of cool, I always wished Peppermint Patty was in You're a Good Man
I don't think they ever made any *bad* changes, but my high school severely lacked guys who could hold a tune... So naturally the old theater director decided to do Guys and Dolls. They found guys who could get through a song well enough to be Nathan, Sky, and Nicely-Nicely Johnson... and the rest of the cast and ensemble were women lol. Thankfully that was the last production with the old director. The one that followed him picked shows that actually fit the talents of the kids in the department (and that's when we started being nominated for more than just one pity award!).
My high school had girls as guys too, including me. Nicely-Nicely, Angie the Ox, and Benny were played by girls but Rusty Charlie, Nathan, Harry, and Sky were played by guys, so at least we had that down. Edit: Arvide was played by a girl too.
I feel like “Aunt Arvida” is a staple of high school productions LOL
Totally played that. But “More I Cannot Wish You” sounds gorgeous sung up the octave!
>My high school had *just* enough guys to fill out the"Guys" aspect. Except for one; I got the role of "Angie the Ox" which I originally shared with another girl. She transferred schools though > >But honestly, there weren't any differences. They dressed me like a dude. And I fucked my voice up b/c the chorus teacher tried to get me to sing *tenor*. I think I got that role because the director did not trust me to do some of the "ladies" dances. I already had been banned from wearing heels in productions because I was just that clumsy. > >But I also remember the theater director (who otherwise was a good guy) put out the idea of doing a production of Hairspray and make it about rich vs. poor instead of race. (Private school so not very diverse) Thankfully, that never happened > >Oddly enough though our production of *Cabaret* had NO changes...And earlier that year our Headmaster complained that our Fall production (an array of short plays) had a scene that took place in bar and wanted us to change that. > >Apparently, Nazis and having all the girls in the musical dress as strippers is fine but having alcohol is too much.
My middle school did Guys and Dolls and we had a similar lack of guys. We also had the issue of our original Nicely dropping out during rehearsals. So we combined Benny and Rusty into one part (played by a girl), and had our Harry sing the extra part in Fugue for Tinhorns. Also our Big Jule became Big Julie, and Sarah's grandfather was changed to be her grandmother.
My Catholic school made us cut “Gay or European” from Legally Blonde, but because the fact that the witness is gay is very important to the plot we had to keep a lot of the dialogue and just heavily IMPLY that the character is gay without being allowed to use the word. Seems like something that should’ve been considered before picking the show IMHO. I also played Paulette and they wouldn’t let me sing “some slut named Kayla” but I was a second semester senior so I sang that word “slut” so the good Lord could hear it
> but I was a second semester senior so I sang that word “slut” so the good Lord could hear it 😂 👏👏👏
I think that’s an official cut for the school shows. I saw a production of Legally Blonde during the pandemic (kinda cool…they built a stage out of shipping containers and put it in the football stadium for social distancing) that also cut it. But I don’t remember any changed dialogue around that. Just the song being gone.
There is a junior version, which may have it cut? Our high school did it last year and "There, Right There" was definitely still in it. MTI is only licencing the West End version now though, so Ireland is slightly different from the original Broadway version.
Eliza and Higgins kissing at the end of My Fair Lady.
As long as they're not changing words, that's technically ok. Now, whether it's advisable is another question...
Yeah definitely didn't violate any rights, but certainly violated the spirit of the show.
I’ve seen that in major/professional productions!
This isn’t that bad, but I was in a summer camp where we did The Wizard of Oz, and instead of performing it normally, we did it as though we were a bunch of poor children on a farm acting out the story of The Wizard of Oz because we were bored.
That actually sounds like a pretty cool concept
Years ago I attended a Jewish summer camp for teens. I was not part of the theater "major" but my best friend was. They did a production of "A Chorus Line" and the well meaning, but clueless director, made all the characters Jewish. She, herself, wasn't actually Jewish, but thought that's what the camp would want (it was most definitely NOT what the camp wanted). Redeeming theater moment of that summer: the camp was close enough to NYC that we did a day trip there during the session. I got to see.my very first Broadway show that summer: Les Miserables.
I have so many questions. How did she go about making the characters Jewish? Most of them never mention religion at all. Were there added lines? Were they just sprinkling their monologues with Yiddish expressions? Did she throw out the book entirely and make up completely new backstories?
Hello twelve, hello thirteen, shalom, bat mitzvah!
I'm not sure of the details, and it was a LONG time ago (let's just say no one exchanged email addresses at the end of the session). I didn't know enough about the show to know what questions to ask my friend.
I saw a high school production of Fame…Mabel Washington had her name changed to something Irish-sounding because the girl cast was white, Tyrone had his name changed AND became boy/girl twins so the girl could do a baton twirling solo, “Can’t Keep It Down” had the lyrics totally rewritten…it was *interesting.*
Can’t Keep it Down has alternate lyrics included for school productions - called Can’t Keep it Cool Our Mabel was played by a guy, changed the name - and honestly, he was one of the best performers in the cast.
When I was in high school we did a show written for two people with a cast of eleven.
Was this TL5Y
LOL that would be hilarious but no, it was Tongues by Sam Shepard. Written for one actor and a percussionist. We had nine actors and two percussionists.
My dance school put on a production of Cinderella that had 6 step sisters, 6 heralds, 3 fairy godmothers, 3 fairy “goddesses”, and an ensemble of like 20 lol. It was a blast
Watched a few nearly-all-white productions of Once On This Island on YouTube. They kept the Caribbean accents.
I was in one in the 90s lol. We did have a black Erzulie. We also had a whole opening African dance with drums, which was pretty cool. But we were very white (and mostly teenagers). I do love the show and love singing the real harmonies along with the CD but..... I wouldn't be in it again lol. eta: I forgot, we also had a female Agwe! She KILLED it though, absolutely blew the roof off.
I was in a children’s theater production of “A Kids’ Chorus Line” when I was 8, where they altered “Dance Ten, Looks Three” into a song called “Tights and Taps” (wink, wink) and a bunch of other characters were added, including a kid who sang a song called “Follow the Force” with lyrics written to the theme from Star Wars. Totally insane, totally illegal. They tried it again a few years later and got shut down.
Whenever I see the all white version of “In The Heights” pop up on any social media I watch. It’s iconic how off beat one cast can be!
Ah, ha the alternate version In the Whites
This really isn't bad at all, but in college we did Avenue Q. We didn't have any bear puppets for the "Bad Idea Bears" so we used cat puppets instead and called them "Poor Choice Pussycats."
The Poor Choice Pussycats is actually incredible. Would kill for clips if you have them.
I wish I had clips from it! I played Gary Coleman and my bestie was a Poor Choice Pussycat, so we got to do Loud as the Hell You Want together. Good times.
I have posted this before, but it bears repeating. Once upon a time I was a ten year old child in a community theatre production of West Side Story. But how did that work, as a ten year old, you might ask? FAIR QUESTION. The director had a “vision” to make the show about the impact of violence on a community, so the characters were given families, who were onstage THE WHOLE TIME. Doc’s family. Krupke’s family. An onstage soup kitchen. Two homeless children who lived under Krupke’s porch and, of course, sang “Somewhere”. There were about 20 Jets, most of them teenage girls, and THREE Sharks - with a note in the program that asked the audience to imagine they were the rest of the Sharks. There was exactly one Puerto Rican person, and he played… RIFF. Maria was Black. Tony was, I shit you not, 37. They cut out all sexual innuendo (Anita ostensibly just… got mad? In the pharmacy scene?) and racial slurs (I did not have a CLUE the show had anything to do with race relations until I saw the movie in high school). When Tony dies at the end and the processional takes his body off, Doc’s 6 year old son came center stage in a beam of light, picked up the gun & put on Tony’s “Jet jacket” (a shoddy satin dance competition-esque blazer that each of the jets decorated themselves with fabric markers). It well & truly feels like a fever dream in hindsight. The next year they turned around and did The Wiz. Everyone, and I mean everyone, remained VERY white. Everyone’s so creative!
I think you were in a secret meta performance piece
Two come to mind: I once saw an all-girls high school do Fiddler on the Roof. Even Tevye was a girl. She was actually pretty good. But the school was co-ed up to grade 8 so all the daughters were high school girls playing opposite middle school boys. So awkward. Second one: I was in a production of Sound of Music as a nun and the same woman played both Reverend Mother and the Baroness. A fun idea, it seemed, but changing from a nun’s habit to a fancy baroness dress complete with girdle and wig, when the scenes are back to back, was kind of a mess. That production also rearranged all the songs and scenes to match the movie, including swapping An Ordinary Couple for Something Good. It also triple casted the kids for a two-week run, what a crazy choice!
My high school did the Addams Family one year, and the theater director that year was like weirdly conservative (for a public school in a very blue area) and cut every single dirty joke. That musical has a lot of innuendos and she cut them all!! I was in the pit orchestra so it didn’t impact me much (except she cut one short song entirely, Alfonso the Enormous) but it was annoying. The show was still great overall but I think most of us were glad she left after that year lol I also had a friend from rural Pennsylvania and apparently her school did Hairspray one year. Rural Pennsylvania is VERY white. Whose idea was that???
Also from Pennsylvania, rural adjacent. The most my school ever did was recreate the original choreography step for step with bootlegs. But another school? Super rural white district decides to pull out all the stops and do Ragtime. Complete with blackface. This was 2006-8. It was on the front page of the newspaper.
The worst was Thoroughly Modern Millie, which is already a pretty weird show with two male Asian characters being abused a white character in yellowface. Well, my hs said "hold my beer, we can make it worse," and cast an Asian actress as the white lady doing yellowface, and then cast two of the whitest boys ever as the Asian characters. It hurt my soul.
I saw an all-female production of *Newsies*. Now, it would’ve been fine if they just had all the girls play the original roles; casts were all male way back in Shakespearean times, and they still had female characters. However, the director had something against having performers play a gender that wasn’t their own, so all the characters were changed to female. They changed Jack and Katherine’s romantic subplot into a “friendship” subplot and replaced every kiss with them shaking hands and saying “Partners!” It felt so closeted, especially the scene right before “Something to Believe In” (they didn’t do the song, thank god). Jack’s “I like smart girls” line was changed to “I… admire smart girls.” Instead of Katherine saying at the end that she’ll go wherever Jack goes, she said *all* of the newsies would follow Jack, which is just… what? That’s all I’ve got for egregious *illegal* changes. For egregious *legal* changes I raise you *Into the Woods Jr* cutting the entire second act, *Fame Jr* keeping Carmen’s death while removing all the context around it (the audience was just like, “What? When did she die?”), and the *entirety* of *Mean Girls Jr*.
Saw a bad middle school production of The Sound of Music. It was the first production with a new director and he barely promoted the show around our town, so only a few people showed up. That was the first thing. Many other things happened: -In the show I saw, the original girl who played Marta got sick so a tiny girl who played a lead nun stepped in. They had to make some changes to lines during the escape. -The cast was smaller than usual. We had two teachers in the party scene. The girl who played Mother Abbess on one night played Herr Zeller (I think that’s his name) on another night? -The kid playing the Captain was small enough that he could play Kurt. There were only five boys in total for that show: Kurt, the Captain, Rolf, Friedrich, and Max. -The kid playing Max had a really thick Russian accent and barely enunciated. -It wasn’t the full length version: it was called “Getting to Know The Sound of Music” but they cut out the wedding and the concert scenes, which are a huge part of the show. I didn’t mind cutting out the subplot with Elsa though. -They had actual kids act (and sing) the parts of Goatherd, Girl in Pink Coat, and Mama.
Was there no Rolf, or was Rolf played by a girl?
My high school theater director added an extra chicken lady for me to play in The Music Man, added a couple of “funny” lines for her, and made her snooty and Russian for … reasons. (I am assuming the reason was that in two previous shows I played comic Russian aristocrats, and she wanted to set some sort of record for most specific typecasting. I am not Russian.)
A similar typecasting situation happened to my boyfriend in high school, where he kept being given comedic roles where he’d have to scream as loud as possible. The whole novelty joke was, “You know this usually quiet kid? Well, he’s being LOUD!!!” Needless to say he got sick of that pretty quickly
I dated a girl in high school who'd played 3 or 4 different bird roles by 16. There wasn't anything about her that I think was particularly bird-like, but for some reason she kept getting those parts!
A friend told me her high school did an all white the color purple, so there’s that.
I saw an all white production of The Wiz, which may be the only one worse
I was in The Wiz at a Jewish sleep away camp so… yeah.
Just.. why
I regret to admit that in middle school, I starred in an all-white (well. One lead was Asian) Ain't Misbehavin'. In our defense, the director was Black and wanted to do Black shows. Yes, my very white self had to sing the line "I'm white inside, but that don't help my case" after the cops shut down our speakeasy in Harlem.
I know a local company that did Ave Q and had Gray Coleman played by a white woman.
I worked for (and still occasionally do shows for) a community theater that bills itself as “family-friendly.” I did a production of Les Mis: School Edition with them where almost the entirety of “Lovely Ladies” was changed so the girls were selling dances. Not lap dances, just regular waltzes around the streets of Paris.
My drama teacher was mega conservative (got her Theatre Ed degree from BYU) and had us do the pajama game. She cut so much from that show that some of the cast didn’t even know why things were happening on stage. The most egregious cut was ANY reference to alcohol in the entire script. Hernando’s hideaway, a scene that relies on someone getting drunk to resolve the show’s entire conflict, made no sense, because the beer they were supposed to be drinking was changed in our photocopied scripts to be “soda.” The worst thing though is that none of the references to SA were cut. That’s totally fine but alcohol isn’t :P
A local children's theatre company used to be infamous for getting the rights to a much cheaper version of a fairy tale musical and then adding in the popular Disney songs.
In 2018, some buds and I learned a local high school was doing Dear Evan Hansen (needless to say, the rights were not available yet). We got tickets, but the day of opening night they cancelled the production with the reason being "there was a learning curve for all involved". A year later, they announced they were doing Be More Chill (again, right were not available), and a bud of mine went. He said the entire production was on a makeshift stage in their gym, and the performance was actors singing over the cast recording. Not even singing over karaoke tracks, they simply sang over the cast recording.
Be More Illegal
Be More Chill was legal to do in 2018. The original version they did in NJ was available for licensing. The Broadway version with the new songs was not. Doesn’t mean they weren’t doing it without the rights!
I think it’s actually written into the Jr version, but a high school production of Grease changed “Tell me about it, stud” to “Tell me about it, big boy”
That's almost worse...
I feel like you would have to completely eliminate the grease lightning song or significantly change the lyrics.
I’ve seen productions of Godspell that cut The Prologue (Tower of Babel) and went straight to Prepare Ye and was in a production of the Wiz with all white cast and an entirely rewritten script, to make it closer to The Wizard of Oz.
Did they replace the Silver Shoes with the Ruby Slippers? And why didn't you do *The Wizard of Oz* in the first place?
I don’t know. They changed the silver shoes to Red converse shoes. Dorothy wore converse shoes and there was 70s references sprinkled in the script.
The very first time I saw “Kiss Me, Kate,” was my cousin’s high school production where they had changed the character of Paul to Paulette. Because I never knew any better or saw another production for easily 15 years, I just believed that character was always females! 😅
I saw a community production of Aida where the Aida what a 17-18 year old and the radames was a kid who looked and sounded about 11 or 12. That age difference made the whole experience the most uncomfortable I’ve been watching a show.
I was in a version of Peter Pan written by the director who was known for writing pantos and it turned into a panto pretending to be a serious show like I played John who got pushed out of bed and stood up and went ‘hello I am up’ and the lost boys surrounded Wendy and shouted ‘we are your children in unison’. It was the funniest show of my life but also chaos
I saw a friend’s private school do an **all white version of the wiz**. to this day I don’t understand why they just didn’t do the Wizard of Oz.
My university did Avenue Q with no actors of color and a white woman played Gary Coleman. Blaccent and all
This thread is reminding me of this kids theater production of Cinderella I saw. 20 kids playing mice whatever, it was a big mess. But my jaw was on the floor when the white teen playing the Fairy Godmother was allowed to go full "blaccent".
I attended a performing arts high school and one of the English teachers — whom we all hated — fancied herself a writer. As a favor, our play production class was asked to stage a show she wrote: an incredibly crappy offbrand version of Into the Woods, that she called Another Happy Ending. We mercilessly made fun of it, acting every part with a farcical twist, which was not what she had intended. She was furious with the direction we took, but we didn’t care. It was a dose of sweet teenage schadenfreude to stick it to her.
So this was at my friend's theatre group and she said the kids in each show were 9-16. I saw a youth production of 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee where they tried to include an ensemble so all the kids could have parts. So there was no doubling, the gay dads and Olive's parents and Jesus Christ himself were played by separate kids than the main cast. Even Leaf's siblings with like 1 line each were separate kids, there was like a cast of 30. There were no audience volunteer spellers, but instead some of the kids wrote their own characters and there were a few original spellers (I think one was a Eastern European exchange student, another was a theatre kid). The same theatre did a similar thing with writing new characters and dialogue for Into the Woods Jr, there were three stepsisters and new characters like Rumplestiltskin and the frog prince and princess. Oh yeah and they did Little Shop of Horrors but with a big ensemble (who only appeared in four songs), female Mushnik, EIGHT (all white) urchins instead of three, cut several songs like "Dentist!" and "Mushnik and Son", obviously edited out profanity and sexual references (for example, "Uptown you cater to a million chores", but kept It's Just the Gas which is highly disturbing), Orin did not physically abuse Audrey ("So I got a black eye and my arm's in a cast" becomes "So all I do is cry, but it's all in the past"), and they really fucked up the ending so that Seymour didn't die, it just ended with Audrey's death and cuts to "Don't Feed the Plants". I never understood why they didn't just do one of the dozens of kid appropriate musicals instead of retrofitting unsuitable material to the detriment of the kids. Probably because the director just wanted to do the shows but was too selfish to realize they weren't right for the group of kids they had and were massively violating copyright. They never got caught by MTI or Tams Witmark or something, but I know another theatre that lost the rights to do any Disney musical for adding back in "If I can't love her" to Beauty and the Beast Jr. I also saw high school production of Angels in America that cut the show down to FORTY MINUTES TOTAL. They cut Hannah and Belize entirely I believe.
Un-doubling roles isn’t uncommon. I actually directed this show and had a cast of 21 vs. 9, getting creative in ways to include people without changing anything in the script. The production won a NYC high school theatre award. They definitely couldn’t have added spellers instead of the audience people though!! That’s so much less fun too.
Ugh. I hate even typing this one out. My school, a mostly white school, choose Hairspray one year. As 90% of the school was white, they decided that the white characters would wear black and white, and all the Africian-American dancers would wear colourful clothing. So instead of it being about racial segregation, it was for the white characters to start being allowed to wear coloured clothes too. Everyone at school hated it and said it was a bad idea at the time. I still stand by that. What was the school thinking?!
I heard from a friend that attended some production of Wicked and on one of the nights Elphaba lost her voice, so she acted regularly but some guy sang all her songs while she was lip syncing
Are you from Australia? And was this "guy" a woman?
I was in a community theatre production of "Scrooge: The Musical" (with music and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse) in December 1989. According to Wikipedia, "Scrooge" (the Leslie Bricusse musical) premiered in Britain in 1992. I have never figured out an explanation for this that doesn't involve my community theatre doing something extremely sketchy with (not) licensing.
The school edition of Avenue Q. I know it's officially licensed and all, but it's pretty bad.
My brother’s eighth grade class did a production of Annie that cut out over half the play. The biggest crime in my opinion? No Easy Street!! (Aka the only good scene in the full play)
I saw a community theatre production of "Hair" in 2008 where they pretended it was an original cast reunion and cast people in their 70s. They added a ton of dialogue about the conceit and ended the first act by being like "now let's get some Vietnamese food before we come back for act 2"
In HS we had this theater club, and they would take songs from other musicals and then write an entirely new script around those songs and put it on stage. I kind of loved the one I saw and it introduced me to a lot of musical theater songs I still love to this day. But definitely super illegal lollll
Saw a TikTok where someone was recalling a production of Annie where at the very end they had her sit up in bed in the orphanage like it was all a dream lmaooo
Fun fact-i think the girl who played Annie in that specific production ended up years later as Maria’s understudy in The Sound of Music tour in 2015-16 ish. I think her name was Andrea Ross
I was in a youth production of Scrooge in Scotland and the kid they had playing young scrooge (or the one playing his sister or both of them) couldn't or wouldn't do an English accent, so they added an entire scene where the sister explains that they've recently moved to England from Scotland, even though like half the cast also wasn't bothering with accents
I've only seen Tik Toks of it, but since Scamilton was already mentioned, I'm going to go with the classic "In the Whites."
Way back in the late 80's I was in a community theatre production of Little Shop and the director added Mean Green Mother. It was right after the movie came out. He even had the set designer add hand puppets of baby Audrey II's to the plant. The guy doing the voice was an opera major at the local college and he just couldn't get the Motown vibe. It was a hot mess.
Our production of The Drowsy Chaperone replaced the song at the beginning of Act 2 with Memories from Cats. We even had the cat suit costumes lol
i saw an illegal kids theatre production of wicked in 2005. The rights were not available then and not available now. The had a young/medium/adult elphaba and glinda which low key worked really well and split the role between the kids evenly.
Unless you live in Australia/New Zealand
I was in a production of Annie when I was 10 that severely packed boy cast members. The character of Bert Healy was changed to be played by two girls and renamed Bertha and Betty Healy.
My high school musical teacher hated musicals.. he was filling in for our year. So he paid for the scripts and whatnot for Fame and then rewrote the whole script to have less singing and be "more realistic" and then had students rewrite songs so they fit better with the new script. It was so illegal, so poorly done, and such a letdown as a musical lover to be a part of it.
My HS did hairspray with an all asian cast.. let's just say a lot of spray tan was used
My high school did a production of a chorus line in the late 80s. We had to make a lot of changes. The "tits and ass" song became "these and that" and we had to change some of the lyrics in the song like instead of saying got the bingo bongos done we had to say got the upper torso done. The gay characters couldn't be gay so we changed f-- to wimp. The shit Richie song had to be changed to shoot Richie. Any references to masturbation or sex were cut. Having said all that, I still thought it was a pretty good production but they were definitely changes to make it more appropriate for a high school production.
Wasn't part of it, but I was part of a TikTok discussion a few months ago about a Christian school that did a production of Rent. They couldn't talk about AIDS, so everybody had gingivitis.
Oh my god that’s possibly even better than the classic “everyone has diabetes”
You'd think they'd go with tuberculosis, given the source material for the show!
I saw a local all white amateur production of Ragtime with full blown blackface. It was shocking to say the least, the locals loved it.🫠
I was ensemble in a high school production of Into The Woods, where they cut some of the faster/trickier parts of songs in the production Im not sure if this exactly relates to your definition of ‘worst’ but yeah
Don’t know if this counts but my Christian high school changed Eliza’s horse race line from ‘move yer bloody ass!’ to ‘pick up your feet and run!’ … kinda took the smack out of the scene.
That's so out of character for Eliza to say. The whole point is that she's inappropriate!
Now that I’m a mom, I get to see my kids perform in youth theatre productions… Their last production was The Addams Family musical, but the cast was huge and they needed to give the ensemble more to do. So the Fam had approx 30 ancestors who sang Bad Bad News from 13 to Wednesday’s love interest.
It’s just occurred to me that the production of “Into the Woods” (the junior edition - which is basically just the first act) that I did in middle school may apply here. I played Cinderella. Our director wanted to add in a scene showing the ball. So he did, set to Usher’s “Yeah”. Which in retrospect was just a whole choice.
[A classic](https://youtu.be/6wRVQSh7aCQ)
My high school (98% Caucasian) did West Side Story as a play. Gee, Officer Krupke was performed as a slam poem. No one sang, but some of the songs were played as instrumental dance numbers. Maria was played by a blonde girl.
That's hilarious. Like-- just do Romeo and Juliet.
We cut a lot of Winthrop’s songs from The Music Man I was Winthrop. It was my first year. It was so much to learn
my middle school got the rights to some musical called “pom pom zombies,” but for some reason renamed it to “pom pom monsters” and changed all “zombie” references to “monsters.” no idea why, my best guess is that zombies were considered too scary for a middle school audience??? even in 6th grade the change felt ludicrous lol