"We've gotta have a great show, with a million laughs... and color... and a lot of lights to make it sparkle. And songs - wonderful songs. And after we get the people in that hall, we've gotta start em in laughing right away. Oh, can't you just see it... ?"
— Judy Garland, "Babes In Arms", 1939.
So
the orphanage is in trouble. Big, costly trouble. How are those orphans going to raise all that money? It's simple. Hey Lets Put On A Show! Time to fix up that old barn and put up a stage!
Made popular by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in the 1930s, but a suprisingly resilient format. A possible subtrope of this may be putting on a show with no orphanage to save. E.G. Taxi did a whole show, in which, the main cast performed song and dance numbers.
Examples:
Film
Literature
Live Action TV
- Parodied in the Scrubs episode "My Life in Four Cameras".
- The Muppets did this a few times.
- The Brady Bunch did this more than once, including the episode in which the family stages "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" in the backyard to raise money for a gift for a teacher.
- In One Day At A Time the cast saved their building and in following seasons just put on a show for no particular reason.
Web Original
- Parodied heavily in an article at The Onion, in which a ragtag bunch of kids band together to save their clubhouse by putting on an incredibly dark, sexual, angsty and incomprehensible avant-garde art play, including a "whore" squatting out filthy young and pre-teen boys nude with body-painted penises.
Western Animation
- South Park had "Chef Aid".
- Futurama has an episode centered on this trope (trying to save Earth from the TV-addicted Omicronians); Fry even used the trope name directly.
- Done in Spongebob Squarepants, but they weren't trying to save anything, Krabs just wanted to earn even more money.
