By Rachel Zarrell
Following a string of misfortunes and debacles, The Great White Way (TGWW) is finally set for next weekend’s performance of the “feel good” comedy musical “Once Upon a Mattress.”
The show, which held auditions last September, has been in the works for several months. The original opening night date was in late December. Multiple challenges, including lack of funding and copyright issues, forced new TGWW president Peter Karpathakis to postpone the date.
“I was trained a little bit beforehand but this was the first time I had to run the group itself, so unfortunately there were a lot of setbacks,” said Karpathakis, a junior cinema studies major.
TGWW, a student-run club, was created in 2003 for students who have an interest in theatre but do not want to compete with theatre majors at auditions. The group produces two musicals a year, while the theatre department performs one musical every other year.
Following several dark comedies that included “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Chicago,” “Once Upon a Mattress” is the first “lighthearted” show to be performed by the club in the past few years, Karpathakis said.
The show, a twist on the classic Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea,” tells the story of a kingdom in which none of the citizens are allowed to get married until the prince is married himself. The queen, who doesn’t want her son to marry, invents a test that is impossible for the princess he loves to pass. The rest of the citizens of the kingdom then gets involved by attempting to thwart the queen’s plan so they can get married themselves.
“Once Upon a Mattress,” however, isn’t your everyday “childish” fairy tale, Karpathakis said.
“Instead of choosing something that is purely all smiles, we chose something that has a lot of quick wit and plenty of sexual innuendo,” he said.
Yet the road to opening night hasn’t been a fairy tale itself. The group encountered a number of difficulties, he said; among them a combination of new, insufficiently trained executive board members, scheduling conflicts and the NU Shuffle.
When the show wasn’t allocated enough money, TGWW filed an appeal for additional funds. The delay distracted Karpathakis enough so that he was late in applying for a legal copy of the script from Rodgers and Hammerstein, who own the rights.
While waiting to receive the rights to officially perform the show, Karpathakis acquired pieces of the script from the Internet to continue rehearsals. Rodgers and Hammerstein, though, took note of how much time had passed since TGWW requested the rights, and assumed an illegal script was being used for the actual performance.
“It just took too long for everything to go through,” Karpathakis said. “When we were finally supposed to get the material
