The large Curry College auditorium, with an enormous stage and excellent accoustics, was as new to me as the play and the company and the production-schedule and the concept of young theater. Obviously not Furth and Sondheim's. Giving a show that paid professionals, even with Hal Prince directing, couldn't make work to a cast so young is loading the dice in the wrong direction. I think I learned enough about the show's flaws that night, but nothing about what a fresh, imaginative new director's eye might see that could give this legendary ugly duckling a fresh professional chance. And despite the applause and the cheering, despite the bows and the bouquets and the laughs in the right places, this was less a performance for an audience than an audience in service to the performance.
Theater is a dialog between performance and audience.
Without an audience, even the best performance is merely a rehearsal, because the object of the game is to move an audience. Here, however, the audience was present so that a performance and not a rehearsal could take place. The performances had become, in a sense, the final exam for the seminar. And that, I think accounts for the vaguely unfulfilled feeling I had as audience that night. I was being shown the level of learned proficiencies that, in other shows and under other circumstances, these kids could use on other audiences.