Reply to Is Mamma Mia appropriate for a high school musical?

Forum Index » Entertainment and Pop Culture

Reply to "Is Mamma Mia appropriate for a high school musical?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Can we go back to the Rent-with-diabetes production? How does this even work?

Diabetes isn’t communicable, and isn’t associated with the lifestyle choices of la vie boheme, so was the whole script rewritten to take place in a southern or midwestern suburb where the characters made poor food choices and practice sedentary lifestyles?

[/quote]

When my HS did Rent in 2010, we had to use pneumonia.  They felt that was a good compromise because so many with AIDS died from pneumonia complications "back then."

We did Grease in middle school and I don't remember all of the changes, but it was heavily sanitized.  Instead of "you know that ain't no shit / we'll be getting lots of tits" during Greased Lightnin' it was changed to "you know that ain't no lie / we'll be singing lots of hits in grease lightnin'" The chicks'll cream was changed to girls will scream but I cannot remember what "she's a real pussy wagon" was changed to.  Rizzo also didn't have a pregnancy storyline.  She was acting out b/c her parents were getting a divorce.

Honestly, I've seen tons of MS & HS productions and the only ones I was every really uncomfortable with were Cabaret and Chicago.  [/quote]

Honestly, if a school/director doesn't think elements of a show are appropriate, they shouldn't do that show. Changing lyrics and entire plotpoints (diabetes, pneumonia) violates copywrights as well as any permission from licensing companies. It is very explicit in all licensing contracts that no changes are allowed. Can you imagine if schools started changing parts of classic books they thought were inappropriate???

Really it is bad to teach theater students that it's okay to change a show that was written by someone else. It's not. It's extremely bad theater etiquette and violates the intention of the playwright and lyricists as well as voiolating contracts with the licensing companies. If a show can't be done the way it was intended, a more appropriate show should be chosen. There's literally hundreds of shows that can be performed without the need to make significant edits.

I'm seriously aghast about the whole diabetes/pneumonia thing. If I knew what schools had done this, I'd report it to the licensing company myself.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics