Bad theater experiences

[Sam Brown]

I've been to see plays I *wish* I could have walked out of - both of 
them revolved around Shakespeare and around school, funnily enough.

The first instance was a school excursion to see 'Romeo and Juliet' - 
it was pretty exciting, because it was a 'proper' play put on by a 
professional acting group. It turned out to be really bad, though, 
because one of the lead actors (whose name I can't remember at the 
moment... it was Romeo's friend... Tybalt?) smoked onstage, as part 
of his role, and breathed out the cigarette smoke all over the 
audience. I'm not a smoker, and while I'm not an anti-smoking Nazi, I 
didn't much like sitting in a cloud of cigarette smoke. It was really 
unpleasant and spoiled an otherwise good production.

The second instance was with a school play, entitled 'A Kidsummer 
Night's Dream'. It was an adaption of the Shakespeare play of a 
similar name, and it remains in my mind as one of the most mind 
numbing experiences of my entire life. The play went for three hours, 
with no intermission and was very, very slow. Obviously the director 
had told the kids acting the parts not to say their lines too fast, 
and as a result, almost all the leads said their lines too 
slowly: "Lord. What. Fools. These. Mortals. Be". My sister and I 
spent the entire three hours bored out of our brains and it's jaded 
me against school productions ever since <g>

Sam