Alternate Show Interpretation

Theatrical Productions are ephemeral. Even if a production is recorded on film, the actual experience can never be exactly reproduced. This quality is arguably the quality, along with the live performance thereof, that distinguishes theatre from other forms of art. This is what enables plays to be performed dozens, hundreds, or thousands of different times.

So let's say you have a famous show that is always thought of as being performed or interpreted in a certain way. Then one day somebody decides to revive it, but with a big twist on the plot that changes the way the entire production is done. Congratulations, you've got yourself an Alternate Show Interpretation, a large-scale defiance of Original Cast Precedent.

Examples of Alternate Show Interpretation include:

• The 2004 Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which sets the whole thing in an insane asylum.
• Similarly, the newest film version of Chicago set all but two of the musical numbers as part of Roxie's imagination.
• The original production of Assassins was off-Broadway at Playwright's Horizons. The Broadway production was the first time the idea of the Balladeer turning into Lee Harvey Oswald was implemented.
• Many, many, many productions of any Shakespeare play—particularly Macbeth—decide to take wildly different interpretations of the text. Given how standard the practice of cutting his plays is these days, it's not surprising.
  • Instead of painting his face black to play Othello, Patrick Stewart played the titular role in a racially inverted production, opposite an otherwise all-black cast. This was by all accounts one of the more unusual productions of the play in recent memory.
    • To be clear, this is generally perceived (amongst those involved in theatre, at least) to be awesome.
  • It's not uncommon for productions of Julius Caesar to have Romans dressed as Nazis.
    • In the 2011 Oregon Shakespeare Festival production, the only change was making Caesar a woman.
• The Berliner Ensemble performance of Schiller's "Der Parasit" ("The Parasite") re-enacts the whole play with actors in puppet outfits (with fake legs and fake arms, done with a sleeve connecting the wrists almost directly to the shoulder). One key character is played by a dozen different actors who pop out of boxes on the stage to chant his lines. The Queen is played by a man (Axel Werner). A comedic sound effect is played for every single action. Needless to say, the actual content of the play becomes moot.
• Modern performances of Bertolt Brecht plays almost demand this trope, to keep the audience alienized, as Brecht wanted it. Common tactics include the use of words projected onto a screen (one of Brecht's favourite tactics), having the actors protest their stage directions, having the actors switch roles halfway through, using minimalist sets, and name-checking Brecht.
  • One memorable Berlin performance of "St. Joan" (in the Deutsches Theater) started out with four actors fighting over who got to play which character, all reading from cheap paperback copies of the play. Once they finally all managed to get a private part in the play, they found themselves stuck in the middle of an It Gets Worse plot, and desperately tried to stop being these characters again (with varying levels of success). Meanwhile, the actors and a miniature cardboard cityscape were filmed live and projected onto a screen, with the SFX crew clearly visible, and as the plot got more dramatic, the floor disappeared from under the actors, slowly forcing them back towards the screen. On which a counter was displayed showing how many people had died of poverty and hunger worldwide during the performance of the play alone. Oh, and? It didn't change or add a single word from Brechts original script. The whole thing was a huge Crowning Moment of Awesome.
• A 2011 Los Angeles production of Bernard Pomerance's The Elephant Man chose to defy in-script instructions that the lead actor not use any kind of makeup/costume to suggest his deformities (he must use body language and vocal distortion instead) in favor of outfitting the performer in an elaborate prostethic suit.
• A 1980 performance of The Magic Show, filmed with the intent of showing it in cinemas but eventually released on home video, dumped several of the show's best songs, added a few new ones of dubious quality, rewrote the lyrics of some of the remaining ones, and bowdlerized the dialogue.