I've read about The Play That Goes Wrong. Here's the thing: I did it already back in 1978 before anyone had - before Noises Off even. The entire last twenty minutes of Stages is exactly a play going wrong - everything. But here's the real thing about it - prior to the play going wrong (I wrote a little spoof of a Victorian melodrama, which we called He Shot the Gun), we show the audience the play going RIGHT. That's what's missing here and why I know that I would grow weary of The Play That Goes Wrong. We see everything work perfectly at the final "run-through" and then the audience knows what it's supposed to be when things start going wrong. We got HUGE laughs every night (no one had seen anything quite like it before) - gunshots not going off, sets malfunctioning, all of it, one thing after another. But without the set-up it wouldn't have nearly been as funny.
But let me illustrate further: I also did a similar thing in Together Again, trying to relive that - less successful - still funny, but less successful. This time it was a bad Equity Waiver/community theater production of an Importance of Being Ernest-type play, which we called He Begs to Differ. An understudy is on, one actress speaks so quietly you can't understand a word she says, the understudy forgets everything, the sets malfunction, etc. But this time, there was no context of "right" so it was less funny. And yes, that, too, was before Noises Off.
