The sad thing about school stories is that they're totally unverifiable, the craziest shit is covered by the administration and becomes myth, living on the rumors and greentext.
Like how my high school's 2005 production of Nineteen Eighty-Four made the third act like softcore bondage. O'Brien was played a teenage girl in leather (or pleather, more likely) and Winston was tied to a chain link fence gate.
It certainly made an impression in my teenage mind.
Hell, in Sixth Grade, there was a school play version of Dracula done as a program for Halloween.
It was the first time I can remember the students at the school being allowed to volunteer for the crew and audition for the cast.
Most of the time if there was a play at the school, it was done by the community theater troupe and they'd tour the schools in the tri-county area.
I actually auditioned and got to play Count Dracula since I was the tallest of the kids and I actually did it pretty well, giving Dracula a fake British accent instead of the usual Bela Lugosi impression.
The budget was practically non-existent since this was a middle school play in a dirt-poor hillbilly area.
As a lot of the costumes were impromptu and since I was tall, I had to provide my own costume. So what I did was take my suit and tie for church since it was a black coat with a white dress shirt, went without the tie and bought a vampire cape from K-Mart and a fake gold medal prop since it was October and you could buy Halloween stuff.
The kid playing Van Helsing had a costume where you could tell the people in charge of costuming and props were trying to imitate the look of the then-recent 2004 Hugh Jackman version, if that movie had a budget of $20 bucks, so it was pretty much my best friend in a cowboy hat and an oversized rain coat.
The Brides of Dracula just wore pajamas for their costumes while the girl playing Jonathan Harker just wore their normal clothes plus a hoodie and sunglasses. I'm still confused by that one.
The girls who played Mina and Lucy costumes were actually decent, typical church clothes and I assume they provided their own outfits like I did.
The acting was awful even by play standards. I at least tried to act and hammed it up badly, but the others just recited their lines by memory and it all came off sounding like that slow monotone way of speaking when they read stuff aloud in class.
The assembly itself was interesting. The gym had a stage since we didn't have a proper auditorium and as such it was deocrated with a bunch of cheap Halloween props like rubber bats, plastic pumpkins and cobwebs, styrofoam tombstones, etc.
Before and after the play itself, they were playing music on a CD boombox with what I assume was a bunch of songs downloaded off of Limewire and burnt onto the cheap blank discs you could buy at Wal-Mart.
Songs included before the play began were the usual stuff like
Swan Lake and
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, along with the typical "Halloween" songs like
The Monster Mash, Don't Fear The Reaper, and
Bad Moon Rising.
When the play ended, the music played again, beginning with
"Love Song For A Vampire" with the lights still dimmed (presumably for some artistic effect) and then when the lights went back on, they were playing
"Backstreet's Back" for some reason as they walked out in line.
Needless to say, the whole Dracula production was a disaster and as far as I know, the school never attempted a student production ever again.
