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[fancycwabs]

Last night I went to see my daughter in her high school production of Edna Ferber and George Kaufman's Stage Door. It was EXCRUCIATING--allow me to enumerate:

• The plot centers around the goings-on in an off-Broadway boardinghouse for aspiring actresses called The Footlights Club, run by a former actress named Mrs. Orcutt. To explain the voice that Mrs. Orcutt used, I must impart an entertainment history lesson: In 1993 Alec Baldwin appeared as the host of Saturday Night Live, and was in a sketch called "The Mimic," where he played an actor who was supposedly excellent at copying voices, which he was supposed to use over the phone to rescue a kidnapped Cavenaugh child. Only he was a lousy mimic, so he failed to rescue the child. He then confided that he'd tricked Mrs. Cavenaugh into hiring him by pretending to be his own reference over the phone, but she was completely fooled, because he was such a good mimic (of a crappy italian accent). Subsequently, he did Mrs. Cavenaugh's voice by going into a broken falsetto with an affected upper-crust accent. That voice is the voice that a teenaged girl used to play Mrs. Orcutt, in addition to other over-the-top embellishments.


• Among the seventeen (!) tenants of the boardinghouse are apparently two (2) high school princesses, one of whom was a nice shade of orange. Amanda Bynes in Hairspray orange. The other was Blair from The Facts of Life.


• The romantic lead, Terry Randall, is courted by an aspiring playwright named Keith Burgess, played by an actor with an Ian Cameron chinbeard, and about as much personality as Ian Cameron himself.


• The critical moment of the show is supposed to be the suicide of Kaye Hamilton. In the movie, this provides an emotional focus for Terry Randall (played by Katherine Hepburn) so that she can learn to act. I don't know what purpose it serves in the play, because it was cut. Kaye Hamilton walks offstage at one point and never appears again, although there's a reference later to a "terrible tragedy" nobody in the audience has any fucking idea what they're talking about.


• In the middle of a couple of expositionary scenes, one of the aspiring actress tenants comes onstage in a leotard and ballet skirt and sings "That's Life" at full volume while dancing all around the stage, over the dialogue.


• The set dressing included a Georgia O'Keefe-esque painting of a stamen penetrating a huge lily. Perhaps this is supposed to be a reference to the famous line from the movie, "The calla lilies are in bloom again. Such a strange flower, suitable to any occasion. I carried them on my wedding day and now I place them here in memory of something that has died." This line was either cut from or does not appear in the play version.


• Each of the seventeen actress-tenants in the show were capable of accurately portraying two moods: Pretentious and Annoying. I've not seen the film version, but I'm going to assume that the thirty pages of dialogue about how much movies suck was at least trimmed for the screenplay.


• All of the factual information contained in this list had to be painstakingly researched by yours truly via Wikipedia and Google Book Search, 'cause I had no idea what was going on onstage last night.

Afterwards, I told everybody (I knew three cast members, including my daughter) that they did a fine job, because you really don't want to shit all over the hard work of highschoolers, even if they suck.

In my daughter's defense, she didn't actually suck, but her lines were pretty much relegated to "yes ma'am" and "dinner is served." She did get the only genuine spontaneous applause of the night when she accidentally spilled a cup of coffee on chinbeard.

* * *

In the break room this morning, we discovered that our anal-retentive (no, really, I'm pretty sure he's an unmedicated OCD) controller had placed all the dishes that were in the sink into a box labeled "Dishes that employees are too LAZY to wash."

Comments

[hatgrlstargazer.livejournal.com]

I myself was in a high school production of Stage Door, which I can only hope was not excruciating (it was the very first production of what subsequently became a very successful theater program, so it holds considerable meaning to me). Perhaps I can clear up a few questions about the script. I haven't seen the movie. In the play, Terry is already a good actress all along, just woefully undiscovered. The tragic suicide as I recall serves to convince the girls to take life seriously. It does occur off-stage, but with a scream heard from the wings and the immediate reactions of several of the girls unambiguously shown on stage. Although it sounds like they probably only cut that one scene.

The line about calla lilies does not occur in the play. The wall should feature a large painting of Sarah Bernhardt, though. There is a running theme of how much better plays are than movies, particularly how much harder it is to act in them. I don't remember anything about someone singing "That's Life".

I take it your daughter played the maid? I remember that being such a fun character.

[fancycwabs.livejournal.com]

That does clear up a few things, although the "running theme of how much better plays are than movies" seems particularly dated and heavy-handed, and, considering that the play was (very) successfully transformed into a movie, hypocritical.

Still, thanks for providing some insight.

[hatgrlstargazer.livejournal.com]

I have to wonder what the playwrights thought of the film version. Near as I can tell from IMDb and wikipedia it isn't all that similar to the play. I also wonder if such a pro-live theater attitude was typical of aspiring stage actors and actresses at the time. It's the same attitude briefly expressed by Kathy Selden near the beginning of Singin' In The Rain, although she drops it entirely when she admits she was just embarrassed to not recognize Don Lockwood.

[samethreechords.livejournal.com]

I was in a production of Stage Door in seventh grade. I played "Billy," the photographer with four lines.

It sucked then, too. To be fair to your daughter's production: we left all that stuff in and it was still pretty much incomprehensible, so either we were as awful (which is more than likely) or the play just blows (which is likelier still.)

[fancycwabs.livejournal.com]

I guess the VAST NUMBER OF CAST MEMBERS (esp. female) makes it a popular show for schools. If Ferber and Kaufman had included a single pillow fight scene, it probably could have saved this production, and as long as the director was going to change the script anyway, what harm would it do to include a pillow fight?

[samethreechords.livejournal.com]

You might as well. From what I remember of the giggly ridiculous plot it would fit right in.

[fancycwabs.livejournal.com]

I'm going to pretend it was a Junior College production not featuring my daughter so that I don't appear quite as big a pervert for wanting lingerie-clad pillow fights included.

[samethreechords.livejournal.com]

Whatever helps you sleep at night, man.

[violentvixen.livejournal.com]

They did that play at my high school when I was in 7th AND 12th grade (hey, I went to an all-girls school, how many other plays have that many women with lots of lines?). I actually remember liking it a lot, and they did leave just about everything in. Although I definitely don't remember a dance number.

But the drama department at my school had the bad/good (depending on if you're a student who wants a part or someone watching the play) habit of casting only the seniors who had acted in stuff millions of times before (often outside of school since this was LA) in the big roles, so we actually had some strong acting talent.

Also, I did that dish thing to my roommates once, except it was a rubber bin and I left it in the middle of their bedroom.

[hemlock-martini.livejournal.com]

The inadvertent spilling of on-stage prop drinks/destruction of minor props were always highlights of our high school productions. One of our more gifted actors accidentally broke something by kicking it (I think it was a potted plant), and in mid-monologue picked it up and hurled it up and over the flats into the backstage without breaking stride. It would have truly been a Stanislavski moment if only he had ad-libbed about how much he's hated potted plants before chucking it.

[fancycwabs.livejournal.com]

In the most recent production of Picasso@Lapin.Agile (which, you might recall, sucked) Einstein's mustache came off in the final scenes, and like most people without strong ad-lib skills, he ad-libbed "they just don't make mustaches like they used to," instead of "this is what I get for fooling around with radiation all the time."