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A lot of people
have asked how on earth we did The
Simpsons as a play, and it’s really not all that complicated.
The show did turn out to be a bit more of a challenge than I had originally
anticipated, but it was great fun to do and the kids who were in it did
uncanny impressions of the characters.
The great thing about The Simpsons was that it could fit into my new lower-camp show
paradigm as something not requiring exceptional singing talent, having a
vast multitude of character roles (albeit almost entirely male) and really
having no plot to speak of, making it easier to change or cut the material if
it became necessary, and also be something with broad appeal that more
mature audiences would appreciate, and that a great many people were likely
to be familiar with. Of course it helped that I’m a huge Simpsons fan, although my new
assistant, Jenny Bales, was not.
The idea occurred to me quite by accident. I went to Sam
Ash one day to buy the music book for Wicked,
and decided to browse through the other books they had to see if I could
find anything intriguing. I really had no idea what to do for the lower
camp in 2005 after the success of Really
Rosie; I was again considering How
to Eat Like a Child but still didn’t know how I could get the
sheet music. Anyway, as I was browsing through the sheet music books I came
across The Simpsons Songbook,
which contained almost 30 songs from various early Simpsons episodes.
Almost immediately I thought to myself, how great would
this be? Even though some of the better-known songs (like “The
Monorail” and “The Garbageman Can”) were not in there,
and I couldn’t really use all of the ones that were, there was more
than enough material in the book for me to string together a series of
brief sketches into a viable lower-camp show. I bought the book
immediately, and the more I thought about it the more I liked the idea. In
fact, I got so excited about it that I started working on the script right
away.
What I ended up doing was assembling various songs into
brief sketches for the first act (including “Kamp Krusty,”
“The Stonecutters’ Song,” “Talkin’
Softball” and “We Put the Spring in Springfield”), and
making the second act into an abbreviated version of the 1997 episode
“Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala[annoyed grunt]cious,” a Mary
Poppins parody. I had to buy two CDs
of Simpsons music, Songs in the Key of Springfield and Go Simpsonic, to get recordings of
all the songs I planned on using, but the two CDs together contained a lot
of useful ideas and other materials, including sound clips and variations
on the main title theme that I could play between scenes. And, of course,
the three-book series The Simpsons: A
Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family, The Simpsons Forever! and The Simpsons: Beyond Forever! were
exhaustive and invaluable resources for me, Jenny and art director Mindy
Fiala.
The only limitation, really, was that I had to use the
characters who were involved in the songs and some of the dialogue scenes
surrounding them, meaning there were a lot of Simpsons characters, including some of my favorites, that we
just didn’t have room for (the TV show has well over 100 recurring
characters so there was no way to incorporate all of them). We had, for example, no Principal Skinner, no
Patty & Selma, no Professor Frink, and only a couple of lines for Comic
Book Guy (“Worst…play…ever!”) However, we did have
substantial parts for about 15 major Simpsons
characters including the family itself, plus singing roles for some
one-time characters (e.g., Lurleen Lumpkin, Tito Puente, and of course
Shary Bobbins), and brief appearances for about a dozen more.
Even better, we had such a huge turnout for auditions
that we were able to cast children who actually looked and talked a great
deal like these characters. Although I had to voice-coach them to get the
nuances and inflections right, everyone who played a major character here
did an exceptional impression of the original. I wish I could go through
all of them, but there were so many I just don’t have the space. I
should mention, though, five in particular whose portrayals were
particularly uncanny: Max Bettan as Homer, Adam Adler as Apu, David
Glassman as Ned Flanders (“Hey-diddly-ho, campereenos!”), Henry
Nwaru as Barney, and especially Stephanie Rubin as Marge. Danni Dikes was
particularly impressive in auditions; she not only had a great singing
voice but did a terrific English accent as Shary Bobbins. Erika Kaminer
also sang well and got to play country singer Lurleen Lumpkin from the 1992
episode “Colonel Homer,” while Sarah Steele took the other main
female singing role as Belle, the madam from the Maison Derrière in 1996’s
“Bart After Dark.”
The show was not without its problems, of course. For
one, this was the first show we did in the brand-new Pontiac Playhouse,
which was still unfinished when the summer of 2005 began. We didn’t
really have use of the entire facility, including the costume/prop workshop
in the back, and many of the stage’s technical features were not
fully in place or operational until just before the show (and some of them
were not finished until afterward). The stage was still a vast improvement
over what we had in the old theatre, significantly wider with much better
sightlines, a more versatile lighting system and a larger forestage, but
essentially the same depth behind the curtain, no access to the far sides
of the forestage, improved but still inadequate lighting, and a
distressingly low ceiling. The new audio system was great, though, and we
added three new body mics to go with the hand-held and body mics we already
had. Perhaps the best addition to the new stage was a powerful, hand-operated
follow spot, something we’d needed for years and which has made a
huge difference.
Another problem we had on this show epitomizes one of the few things that truly annoys me about camp. Close to 90
campers, far and away the largest number ever, auditioned, and I
told everyone beforehand that I could not and would not cast more than 50,
which was about all I could handle and was itself significantly more than I
really needed. I ended up casting close to 60, all of the boys and sophomore girls and a select group of freshman girls, anyone who had even a
modicum of singing ability or stage presence, but the 30 or so children who
were not cast had predictable tear-filled responses, prompting the
directors to insist that I cast them even though (a.) I really didn’t
have anything for them to do, (b.) it was really more kids than I could
handle all at once, and (c.) there simply wasn’t enough room
backstage, particularly without the utility room available, for that many
children, let alone to try to cram them in without creating a safety
hazard.
The directors, of course, insisted nonetheless; they had
promised the parents that every child
who auditioned would get to be in the show. Although I seriously questioned
the wisdom of making a promise like that which was really not reasonable,
which I would end up having to
keep, and which would place me in an unmanageable situation, not to mention
the fact that the children would all get to perform in “Hits,”
Sing and other events, I reluctantly added the extra 30 children to the
cast. Unfortunately, frustratingly, but completely predictably, all 30 of those children, who had
cried and cried and cried about not being cast, dropped out of the show within four days, in some cases without
ever coming to a rehearsal. I understand that these are very young children
who do not really understand the nature of a competitive tryout, who are
very fragile and very unaccustomed
to not getting what they want, but this was absurd.
Fortunately, the cast we ended up with was terrific. As
I mentioned above, all of the character impressions were spot-on, the
performance ran smoothly despite the technical limitations of the
unfinished stage, and the audience (particularly the Simpsons fans among them) really loved the show. It was a great
beginning for the new theatre.
_____
Pontiac
Players present
THE SIMPSONS
Songs by
DONICK CARY, TERRY CASHMAN, ALF CLAUSEN, BEVERLY D'ANGELO, JEFF D'ANGELO,
GREG MARTIN DANIELS, AL JEAN, KENNETH C. KEELER, JAY KOGEN, JEFF MARTIN,
BILL OAKLEY, MICHAEL REISS, JOHN SCHWARTZWELDER, JOSH WEINSTEIN and WALLACE
WOLODARSKY
Based upon the
television show created by MATT GROENING
Developed by
JAMES L. BROOKS, MATT GROENING and SAM SIMON
Principal
Cast
MAX BETTAN as
Homer Simpson
STEPHANIE RUBIN
as Marge Simpson
JUSTIN HENDLER
as Bart Simpson
STEPHANIE
COHEN as Lisa Simpson
SAMANTHA KOHN
as Maggie Simpson
JOSH OLIN as
Abe (Grampa) Simpson
TYLER KATZ as
Troy McClure
EVAN APPEL as
Krusty the Klown
ERIKA KAMINER
as Lurleen Lumpkin
MATT KAMINER as
Zeke
ADAM ADLER as
Apu Nahasapeemapetilon
HARPER BERMAN
as Tito Puente
ANDREW
GLASSMAN as C. Montgomery Burns
COLIN ZUCKER
as Waylon Smithers
DAVID GLASSMAN
as Ned Flanders
ADAM SCHUTZMAN
as Moe Szyzlak
HENRY NWARU as
Barney Gumble
SARAH STEELE
as Belle
DANNI DIKES as
Shary Bobbins
MICHAEL
CAPILUPI as Cletus
HARRY SOLOMON
as Rev. Lovejoy
JON SHAPERO as
Mayor Joe Quimby
STEPHANIE
SILVA as Mrs. Quimby
J.B. BONGIORNO
as Jasper
COLE
FREIDFERTIG as Jimbo
JACOB ROSEN as
Dolph
LUKE KUSHNER
as Kearney
MADISON KATZ
as Mrs. Pennyfeather
JOSH WEINSTEIN
as Chief Clancy Wiggum
JAKE GIBSON as
Snake
CORY AZMON as
Groundskeeper Willie
BEN GILMAN as
Comic Book Guy
Directed by
JAY BRAIMAN and JENNY BALES
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