the slightly off-Broadway productions
In recognition of the recent U.S. Thanksgiving, I posted last week about a
diarrhetic turkey I worked with in a fundraiser staged by a campus religious
centre. United Ministries in Higher Education was a block off Broadway, the
major street in Pittsburg, Kansas.
The fundraiser was at a sizeable hall in Pittsburg’s main park. The UMHE
community figured out that it would be cheaper and easier to do future pro-
ductions in our own building.
So we did — seven of them, all in a “Saturday Night Live” vein. The format
worked well because it’s modular. Unlike a play, we didn’t need lots of com-
plicated rehearsing. Most sketches were five to ten minutes long, so we only
needed the personnel in a particular bit to show up at one time. With all our
personnel coming from the UMHE community, this was a real plus.
It’s not that we didn’t have ample talent. Our group had a buxom blonde lady
who played guitar and spoke fluent Spanish. She was perfect as Charo. We had
another skilled blonde, a young man who played excellent piano and made a
terrific Barry Manilow. When we wanted to feature a blue grass band, we put
one together with no problem.
When we spoofed “Midnight Special”, our burly, bearded Wade did a spot-on
Wolfman Jack. He got an extra laugh by not trying to imitate Jack’s trademark
gravelly voice with the ad lib “Welcome. I’m happy to report that my nasty
head cold has finally cleared up.” Wade also played Farth Vapor when we took
on “Star Wars”. He had the line “Sorry, the Force is really with me today. The
chili at the cantina is lethal.”
We reimagined “Rocky” as “Rockette”. Multi-talented Susan, who wrote the
sketch, played the lead, who fretted that no one had ever gone the distance
with the world champ, Apostle’s Creed. Undaunted, though, she trained. She
ran around the stage and through the audience to the strains of “Gonna Fly
Now”, smoking a cigarette and punching a string of sausages.
And she prevailed. It turned out that someone had indeed gone the distance
with Apostle’s Creed. She got pregnant and had to forfeit the fight. Rockette
won by a knock-up.
The flip side of our amateur productions was the amateurs. One actor got
stage fright and took his script onstage. Another called a few hours before
a show and said, “I can’t make it tonight. I have to babysit.” I had to play her
part. Uber-funny Joe and I tried to do some comedy improv and died a slow,
agonizing death on stage. It felt like time had stopped.
Yet overall I look at those shows as some of the highest points of my life. I
learned a lot about live production and the pressure that goes with it. In one
show, I wrote the fake newscast that started the second half during the break.
Mostly, though, I learned how to best utilize the strengths of everyone who
wanted to participate. That was extremely challenging and rewarding.
