Reform School for Wayward Girls
| Reform School for Wayward Girls | |
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| Theater | The Hideout Theatre |
| Directed by | Kaci Beeler |
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| Run | Sep/Oct 2014 |
Reform School for Wayward Girls is a mainstage show at The Hideout Theatre set in a 1970s all-girl reform school.
Summary
The show takes place in 1976 in St. Agatha's Reform School for Wayward Girls, a reform school in the fictional town of East Libertyville, Ohio. The show is based on old exploitation films such as Girl Gang, Reform School Girl, and Girls in Prison.
Show Structure
Each performance opens with a hosted introduction from "Mitch Dawson", the superintendent of the East Libertyville Independent School District. The host welcomes the audience and gets an audience volunteer to assign a set of six reform-school-girl archetypes (such as "the cheerleader" or "the daddy's girl") to six of that night's female cast members. (Each archetype comes with a basic description and a set of accessories.) Then the show proper starts with a choreographed dance number to the Runaways' "Cherry Bomb". The dance includes the whole cast: the six students, one student-aged boy, and two adults (one male, one female).
The dance then segues to the first act, which is an improvised monoscene in which a teacher oversees the six girls in detention. The scene opens with a roll call which establishes each girl's name. The scene then includes pop-out flashbacks to earlier scenes from the girls' lives, which usually include information about how each one landed in the reform school. Typically, halfway through, there is a fight among the students that prompts the arrival of a sinister headmaster or similar authority figure. The first act ends with another fight among the girls and then the end of detention.
The host returns to announce a ten-minute intermission. The host has, by this point, come up with three loglines for improvised narratives -- he announces those to the audience and instructs them to vote on which story they want. At the end of intermission, the host returns to re-introduce the girls (with a WWE-style introduction) and announce the winning story. He then sets up the first scene, performs a bit of scene-painting, and leaves the stage.
This begins act two, which is an improvised narrative. The cast improvises the story the audience picked, typically with the six "reform-school girl" improvisors playing those same students throughout, and the other three performers playing every other character in the story. Often, the narrative includes a montage-style scene where all the girls have to work together to achieve some complicated goal.
Media
Videos
- Video by Peter Rogers of the 9/6/14 show.
- Video by Peter Rogers of the 9/13/14 show.
- Video by Peter Rogers of the 9/20/14 show.
- Video by Peter Rogers of the 9/27/14 show.
- Video by Peter Rogers of the 10/11/14 show.
- Video by Peter Rogers of the 10/18/14 show.
Photos
- Photoset by Steve Rogers of the 9/6/14 show.
- Photoset by Peter Rogers of the 9/13/14 show.
- Photoset by Peter Rogers of the 9/27/14 show.
- Photoset by Peter Rogers of the 10/11/14 show.
- Photoset by Steve Rogers of the 10/18/14 show.
