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What was the worst production of a Shakespeare play you've ever seen? Please describe.
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Hoo boy, I am rushing to comments to describe one!
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I saw the production of Measure for Measure where the Duke was four vampires.
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Two words: Naked Shakespeare.
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I have never seen a bad production of a Shakespeare play!
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I have never seen any production of a Shakespeare play, and after reading these comments, I'm now scared to.
4 (9.5%)
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It was extremely Coarse Theatre.
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The thing that made it so bad was that it had SO MANY fantastic actors in the cast, dying a slow death in the face of a series of terrible directorial and design choices. I mean, I may actually have seen productions which were lower in general quality; it was the disparity between potential and result here, and the sense that the cast all knew it and were very depressed, that made it despair-inducing to watch.
The second half featured a lot of semi-naked extras wearing costumes that can only be described as "World War I softcore gay porn" standing around posing dolefully in the background, and EVEN THAT WASN'T FUN.
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The mildly bad: It was an international cast, so all the performers were good actors, but there were language difficulties and such that made it hard for the performance as a whole to cohere. Also, This was at the Globe, but the director had no idea how to make use of a thrust stage, and treated the entire thing as if it were a proscenium stage.
The worse: By the time the performances started, the director and the leading actor had stopped talking to each other.
The ugly: The play in question was The Merchant of Venice. The director was going with the interpretation where Shylock is just straight-up evil --
-- and the actor playing Shylock was German.
I am exceedingly glad that the day my mother and I went to the Globe happened to be a day when they were staging As You Like It instead, which had none of the above flaws.
The worst one I've personally seen feels unfair to rag on, because it was a community theatre production of Macbeth. But I basically had to plug my ears during the cauldron scene, because for historical reasons I have Strong Feelings about that bit, and it sounded like they were reading out a grocery list. I'm also peeved at the production of Much Ado About Nothing that characterized Beatrice as trying way too hard and not nearly as funny as she thought she was, which as far as I'm concerned is character assassination.
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...also, I really want to hear about this Measure for Measure where the Duke was four vampires. What?
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When I was a teenager, I was part of a very amateur youth production of Antony and Cleopatra. Our Antony was cast entirely on the basis of being male and willing to play love scenes, as you do. He was... kind of a ham? I mean, he could act, but his strengths were in comedy. So he had excellent surprised reactions to his servant killing himself instead, and to "What, Cleopatra's *not* dead?" which in rehearsal I thought were good drama. The audience found them hilarious.
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I still have a few random lyrics stuck in my head, twenty years later. Like, "she has a special place in my heart that I keep inside my doublet/ nothing like a sublet!" which Valentine sings when he falls in love with Sylvia, or "She's a water lily lady/ she's a calla lily lady" something something "I want my friend to be ha-ha-ha-happy/ but NOT happier than me," which Proteus sings when jealous of Valentine for winning Sylvia's affections.
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Also everyone was carrying at least one briefcase, at all times, everywhere. They were never opened or referenced. Sometimes people had three or four of them.
I think that may also have been the production where there were a lot of televisions nailed to the ceiling and to various parts of the set, but all of them facing downwards towards the floor, and actors who weren't acting, or, sometimes, who were, would lie on the floor and gaze up at whatever was playing on the televisions. Which the audience could not see. I mean I assume something was playing on them.
This director, the head of theater at my college, was very much Like This. His actors loved him, because he prioritized their experiences over those of, for example, the audience, but I always wondered how they coped with trying to work with people who aren't Like That after graduating. I went to a few of his plays, both out of terrified curiosity and because my now-wife worked tech, but it was just all Like That all the time.
I still occasionally wonder whether I should have gone to a production of his for which I literally and intentionally left town. It was The Beggar's Opera, using the entire campus as staging and requiring a fair bit of hiking from the audience, and I left for the weekend because I saw the audition announcements.
He hired no musical director and figured that the songs would 'evolve from the actors' consensus'.
I feel that deciding to be a couple of hundred miles away was basic self-preservation on my part, but I also sometimes wonder about the details of the trainwreck.
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the songs would 'evolve from the actors' consensus'.
This is like an incantation to summon an Elder God.
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However, if you count this, I also saw a high school play that was like... they were doing Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story at the same time? At first they were going back and forth between them, and then the characters were meeting each other in some bizarre ill-conceived crossover.
This was all the fault of the theater teacher at our school, who was always writing these terrible original(-ish) plays that he thought were just hilaaaaaarious. It was like he thought he was being clever to point out the parallels between R&J and WSS, as if maybe he... somehow... didn't know that one play is literally already a retelling of the other...?? It's hard to imagine that an educated adult who teaches musical theater could not know that, but I'm not sure how else to explain what I saw onstage that night.
Adding insult to injury, I only saw the play because a guy I had a crush on was in it, but it was so mortifyingly bad that I couldn't even enjoy it on that level.
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I did that once. Along with a bunch of his other friends. It was Spring Awakening, it was long and boring, and then when we were all struggling to stay awake, one of the characters came on with no head and his voice emanating from his built-up chest and shoulders (which made him 6 inches taller than he'd been previously) and his head under his arm, and then we were all wide awake and trying not to crack up, and then he tossed the head exactly like a basketball and then we HOWLED with laughter for 15 minutes straight. Every time we managed to control ourselves, he'd speak from his chest and then we'd all be off again.
We were the only people in a huge proscenium theatre so it was obvious it was us. Afterward we were so ashamed we slunk out and fled rather than congratulate him backstage as we'd done the entire thing to do in the first place.
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Does college count? There was that "relevant" production of Macbeth--it was always that one--in which everyone wore early seventies street wear, bare stage, all the emotion stripped out because Relevance! Because Isolation! Because Nihilism and Entropy!
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Paul Scofield played Lear, and he's a good actor. All I really remember now is that during the storm, the film cut to a different view of Lear's face on the caesura of every line and I thought I was going to die of vertigo. Also I felt that the damn words could stand on their own and this was unnecessary showing off. My boyfriend was slightly puzzled but willing to leave with me.
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So we did. Timothy West who is usually great was playing Menenius, Janet Suzman was Volumnia. This should have been amazing. Unfortunately Timothy West barely remembered any of his lines and had to be heavily prompted, Janet Suzman looked alternately bored and peeved by Timothy West, entirely understandably. My Shakespeare and Selected Dramatists seminar tutor was sat in front of me, and he looked very embarrassed through the first half. Probably because he had hectored us all into attending and we'd paid (a very heavily subsidised price) to attend. Then in the second half - I think, I've somewhat blanked the production from my memory - there was a scene where Coriolanus and Aufidius were in a tent. Fine, we all think, they have an important scene coming up. And then we have to listen to ten minutes or so of an audio soundtrack which sounds like it's come from porn. My tutor has fallen asleep, a little bit after we get back from the interval. He jerks awake as the heavy breathing is surrounding us, buries his head in his hands and just leaves the theatre. Never came back. Now, this is a relatively homoerotic/homosocial element of the play and that is very interesting and could be staged very interestingly. But a tent, with weird blue dimmed light, and a bad porn soundtrack is not how to do that.
Really we should have known it would be a car crash because we'd been to the pre-show talk where Greg Doran stood on a stage and told us all that he only agreed to direct because they needed someone to direct Coriolanus or they wouldn't manage the full Complete Shakespeare, and that he'd never actually a) enjoyed Coriolanus as a play or b) wanted to direct Coriolanus.
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We studied 'MacBeth' sometime between 3rd year and O-Level. The next-door boys' school put on a production, so necessarily my form went to see it.
The leading man had lost his voice, but came on to play the character and do the moves, which inexplicably were performed pelvis-first. Possibly it was an interpretational choice. Meanwhile, the English teacher who had directed the play read the dialogue, imbuing every rich and fruity syllable (think Donald Sinden )with the maximum possible meaning.
The other actors were frequently puzzled by this arrangement, and seemed not to know whether to direct their lines towards MacBeth's pelvis or the teacher lurking in the pit.
During the sword fight between, um, whoever, the wooden sword came apart and the 'blade' flew into the audience, causing some excitement. The English teacher intervened at this point, urging them to keep fighting anyway.
And, joy of joys, the copious fir tree branches which made up Birnham Wood proved to be crawling with tiny beasties, which made their way into the ranks of watching schoolgirls.
It was **awesome**.
BTW, I love your icon.
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Aaaaaaahahaha omg. This entire story has me in tears of laughter, but every time I look at this sentence I lose it all over again.
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Enjoy the trailer, which features YELLING, Macbeth being balanced on a tabletop?, and weird public bondage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ysd5gwHfG1w
And the WITCHES, who for some reason are way out during low tide on a beach and has spitting and mumbling. Then they walk on water? and disappear? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZcFnZ2ZMR0
I think I made it about halfway through, if that.
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(For those who have never heard of Kabuki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabuki)
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It was very entertaining to see my mother pretending to be a witch on stage, especially when I recognized some of the ingredients of the Witch's Brew as creepy plastic bugs that belonged to my brother, but ... yeah, it was not GOOD.
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LOLOLOLOL.
I was required to take acting classes to get my degree, though THANK GOD actual plays were cast by audition so while I had to audition I did not have to be cast. I was terrible and I hated it.
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The best I can offer is The Goodbye Girl, in which Richard Dreyfus's character has been cast to play Richard III in the worst-ever production. Wearing a purple smock.
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As in, two actors would step to the center of the gym, lock eyes and
Actor A: Line!
Girl On Book Nearby, the MVP Of The Show: [The line in question}
Actor A, again, with vague disinterest: Line.
Girl On Book Nearby: [The next line]
Actor B: Line!
(And the cycle continues, except for when the one actor who knew their lines showed up and desperately tried to act at the amazingly not even remotely embarrassed other "actors")
One of the actors actually walked away while her lines were being read! And the worst part was, I knew the one actor who knew their lines. I had come to support them!
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...and went, "Wait a minute, isn't this where TES meets?"
It was in fact the same building and same floor where the Eulenspiegel Society, a venerable NYC kink organization, holds its meetings. Our guess was confirmed when we were sitting in the room waiting for the play to start (house lights still on) and someone opened the door who was dressed, uh, not for Shakespeare. "Down the hall," we said. "Thanks!" they said, and went off down the hall while the other theatergoers looked extremely confused.
The actor cast as Richard was large and Black and bearded and spoke with a deliberate but not affected African-American preacher's cadence. When he said "Let us sit upon the ground" it sounded like an instruction to open one's Bible to the part where there are sad stories about the deaths of kings. Many years later I saw the movie theater rebroadcast of David Tennant's Richard II, and it was splendid, but that amateur actor is the one who made those lines really work for me. Alas, the rest of the play was somewhere between mediocre and meh. Mostly it's "that production of Richard II that was up the hall from the caning demo" in my memory.
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Special honorable mention to Twins Who Are Super Obviously Not Identical But The Plot Requires Them To Be, and to that one middle-school Tempest production I was in where it was played as if Prospero had made only good choices and Caliban had it coming.