Excellent topic. I'll throw my 2 cents in.....
A few years ago a director friend of mine offered me a gig to SM a hip-hop musical that she had been coordinating with youth at risk over the past 8 months. The non-profit organization that was behind it had been around for several years and dealt primarily with kids who were pretty much at the end of the line. Drugs, prostution, homelessness. These were part of their daily lives. The organization, called "ihuman", set up an art studio/walk-in centre for kids to express themselves in a more positive, creative way, while counselors were available to offer help in getting them off the streets/drugs. This musical was created collectively through improv exercises and games.
Some of the hilights of the gig include:
- casting a girl who was getting out of jail because the original cast member had just gone in (and wasn't getting out for a while)
- asking a 16 year old girl what crystal meth looked like
- telling an 18 year old gang member that, no, he CAN'T bring his gun from home to use in the play
- seeing a couple of our 15 year old cast members getting into a john's car after rehearsal
- having another couple of 15 year old girls steal the producer's car for a joy ride
Anyway, you get the picture. Of course, after 8 months of working with the director, here I come in and suddenly I'm the authority figure (all 5' 2", 130 lbs of me!). You can imagine how well THAT went over. It took me almost all of the six week contract to finally win them over.
Tech was a nightmare. The show was 3 1/2 hours long, with 8 lav mics being mixed live, a couple of wireless mics, scene changes from hell, a cast of 16, and sound and lx cues coming out of the yin-yang. The kids also wrote all of their own music and lyrics, so naturally we didn't have it all by the time we got to tech
Needless to say, it wasn't the smoothest tech I've ever ran. But we got through it.
In one of the scenes, I had to call a gunshot cue. (Man, I hate those!) With professional actors, you just make sure you have a visual cue to go off of, and everything works out fine. Well, the guy pulling the trigger wanted to make it a surprise for the audience, so naturally it had to be a surprise for me. On the last night (it was only a 3 day run) I finally got it right. (A little background on this kid: he'd been abused by his mother and his sisters treated him like crap. He was, however, devoted to his older brother, a gang member. He wasn't a big fan of women, to say the least. He was also 6' 4" and big as a house.) More on him later.
I'll never forget the last performance though. When they came out for the curtain call, they all ran on stage, screaming and yelling, hugging each other and cheering each other on. The audience wouldn't stop applauding. The cast screamed for me to come down from the booth, and for the asm's to come out from backstage. We all went up and as soon as I hit the deck, the kid with the gun came running up to me, hugging me and spinning me around yelling "The f*cking gun shot worked!!" over and over.
For the run, organizations like the Boys and Girls club would bring their own clients who were at risk youth. One runaway told her councellor after the show that she wanted to call her mom after not speaking to her for 3 or 4 years. During the curtain call one night, a group of boys who'd come with their councellor kept shouting "F*ckin' A". Tons of stuff like that happened.
It was absolutely the most rewarding show I've ever worked on in my life. A few of the kids even got off the street after that and cleaned up, going on to college or finishing high school. I will never forget it as long as I live.