The History of Shear Madness

On the photo above is a scene from Shear Madness in our theater Komedija in Zagreb, where I watched this show yesterday.

  It all began in the summer of 1976 with a production of I Do, I Do at the Lake George Dinner Theatre in Upstate New York. Bruce Jordan, a former high school teacher, was directing the summer stock production. Marilyn Abrams, also a former school teacher whose first love was performing, was acting in the musical. Jordan and Abrams worked well together and quickly became friends. They discovered that they shared a similar sense of humor as well as the same favorite play (Noel Coward's Private Lives). Of course, as actors in constant pursuit of work, they also shared a similar lifestlye. When production of I Do, I Do ended, their friendship continued. Later that year, Jordan was working at a theatre in Rochester, New York when he came across a play entilted Scherenschnitt, which had been written in 1963 by German writer and psychologist Paul Portner. The playwright had written the script to use as a study of how people perceive or misperceive reality. The brief play was set in a uni-sex hair salon and revolved around the off-stage murder of a concert pianist. Subjects were asked to solve the murder based on their individual perceptions of the events and the six stereotypical characters surrounding the murder. Jordan was intrigued by the concept of the script and suggested that he and Abrams stage the play together in Lake George. Abrams read Portner's original script, which she describes as "primitive" and says that if she hadn't known and trusted Jordan as she did, she "would have run for the hills" at the prospect of revising and staging a production of such a work. She did trust him though and they opened the newly titled Shear Madness in Lake George in 1978 with nothing more than a basic outline of a script. The first year that Shear Madness played in Lake George it was truly a work in progress with the majority of the show improvised each night. As an ensemble, the cast maintained the action and the characterizations that received a good response from the audience night after night. They also incorporated the actual audience responses into the play. Jordan says that he continues to instruct the actors to "let the audience win." He explains, "if the audience has something funnier to say or do than the actors, let them. That is the basic magic of the play." Soon Shear Madness developed into a show that changed every time it was performed. The actors followed a basic format and changed the specific lines along the way. Now, decades later, Shear Madness incorporates not only the contributions of the audience, but also frequent references to the latest media scandals and local news items.