Musical theatre is in an odd position within the theatre world. Musicals grace Broadway stages and car stereos across the nation. They become pop culture icons and films.

They also get a bad rap.

Everyone has been there. 

The show was announced, maybe it was a play you didn’t know or one you loved and dreamed of doing for years, either way, there is THAT role. That role you are perfect for. You are in love with that role. You must play that role. 

I have recently been watching Smash by Theresa Rebeck with my girlfriend and it struck me in two ways. Firstly, Theresa Rebeck is a genius and one of my favorite writers out there. Second… Derek Wills is one of the most charming jerks I’ve ever loved on screen. Three. Three things, then – third being that Smash is one of the most brutally honest dramatizations of…drama. The sometimes cutthroat nature of auditions, the sore feelings afterward, and just how dumb everyone can be during the process because we’re a bunch of weirdos stuck in a single room together for hours.

The naked body.

It is one of the last taboos in American theatre, or in any other form of American art, for that matter. Audience members will gladly accept all of the vulgar language and explicit in the world, but if an actor dares to appear without clothes on for even one short scene, all hell will break loose.

Theatre goers - question for ya, “Why do you care what people wear?”

Let’s set the scene. I was scouring the deep webs of the Theatre Twitterverse at Grand Central Station before my train took off and I lost all cell reception until 33rd St. Right when the 6 train left the station, I stumbled across an article bemoaning the lost sense of propriety, the lack of respect for today’s performers and Broadway’s legacy - all because some audience members wore flip-flops to a show.

Really. Ok.

We come to theatre to be thrown into a world for a couple hours, but sometimes, audience members want to disrupt this world, either wittingly or unwittingly. Its painful enough to be near these disruptive member as an audience member, but while you’re on stage? That’s the ultimate test of wits. How should an actor handle it? Different Broadway actors handle it in different ways. How should they handle it? Its too big a question for one person handle, so we at OnStage Blog threw it up to our staff, and we got some fun responses. 

The situation specifically posed to the staff was as follows: “You’re performing on Broadway, and you’re in the middle of a serious, tense scene. You can hear a group of 3 people laughing throughout this scene, loud enough to reach the stage and cause some audience to grumble and try to shush them. How do you, the actor, respond to this?”

Grease is legendary, so it makes sense that there are lots of conspiracy theories surrounding particularly the film version of the musical. The question is, how many of them are believable? Here are my favourites.