BLACK COMEDY....lots of fun for the actors....as an audience member I was very bored.
Of course the production I saw didn't feature any of the DR from HHW!
Ann and Jed, you will understand this storyWhen I first went to Central Washington State University, back in the Middle Ages, the Theater Department was into producing a lot of rather dry, rather boring
drama classics. As a result we didn't exactly draw crowds of students or town's people to our productions. My freshman year we did
Juno and the Paycock and Brecht's
Galileo. I think our largest audience was about 75, in an auditorium that seats about 600. It was really dismal.
My second year, one of the drama professor’s directed
Black Comedy, and since she was kind of a dirty old lady, she put every suggestive and bawdy thing she could into the show. I got to play the flaming queen in the production. On opening night we had our usual 50 people in the audience, but still ended up getting a standing ovation. The second night we doubled the crowd to 100, and by the second weekend we were playing to sold out houses. Some students came back to see the show three and four times; and evrey night was another standing
O. I don't think they ever went back to "just" doing the classics again.