Prisoner Performance

Prison: Where the Fourth Wall separates the performers from the audience as a security precaution.

"Schlesinger, if you have time to fashion a shiv and organize a jump on the rats in Block C, you have time to learn your lines, 'kay?"

— BoJack Horseman, BoJack Horseman, "Nice While It Lasted"

Prison isn't very fun. The food is terrible, the toilets are filthy, the guards are jerks, and the inmates are constantly angry and violent. So why not liven up the mood with a bit of live theater and entertainment?

Fiction and media set in prison will sometimes have a group of inmates perform onstage for the other prisoners and the prison staff or, on rare occasion, select members of the general public. This idea will typically come from the "nicest" or most eccentric person in prison (usually someone with an artistic background) as a means to lift morale and/or to help with prisoners' rehabilitation. Sometimes prisoners will act out an original play; sometimes it'll be an adapted work; other times they'll put on a variety show; occasionally song and dance is involved (though, ironically, the harmonica is rarely used for musical accompaniment). For comedic purposes, the performance will usually be something far more poetic and beautiful than you would expect from a bunch of burly baddies and murderers. It will also likely be very low budget, given that the jailed performers don't exactly have a lot of resources at hand for costumes, props, or scenery.

This is also quite a novel and surprisingly common way for prisoners to stage a Great Escape. This usually either entails distracting the warden and guards with a big show while others make an escape route or the performers themselves escaping right in front of the audience, as the authorities believe that their escape methods are All Part of the Show... only for them to never return for their final bow.

Often, the staging of a Prisoner Performance itself within a larger work of fiction can be seen as a type of Show Within a Show.

Compare/contrast: School Play, the kinder, more kid-friendly version of amateur theater.

This is Truth in Television, as many artistic institutions believe that incarcerated people benefit greatly from having a creative outlet, believing it can boost their social behavior and self-esteem. Here is a list of some real-world prison theater projects.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V: The prisoners, led by Chojiro and Yuya, put on an entertainment duel tournament among the inmates with flashy lights, performances, and everything. The reason for this being that the spectacle would distract the guards from the other inmates who are trying to escape the prison.

Comic Books

• Lucky Luke: "Le Cavalier Blanc" ends with the fraudulent actors imprisoned and putting on a show for the rest of the prison. Only this time, the audience start booing the hero.

Film — Live-Action

• Airheads ends with the Lone Rangers performing a rock concert in their prison's mess hall after they are arrested for holding the radio station hostage. A closing text crawl mentions that the live record of said concert went triple platinum.
• The Blues Brothers ends with the band performing "Jailhouse Rock" in their prison's mess hall.
• The Bridge on the River Kwai: After the British POWs have finished building the bridge, that night, they put on a burlesque show for each other and for the officers, which Col. Nicholson is entertained by.
• Caged Heat: Inverted. McQueen, the warden, has an erotic dream about performing in the talent show for the inmates.
• Downplayed in Cool Hand Luke, where one of the inmates, played by Harry Dean Stanton, has acquired a banjo somehow or other and occasionally serenades the other prisoners with old blues and country songs, but it's not on any kind of stage or in any kind of official capacity. In another scene, Luke himself finds a guitar and plays "Plastic Jesus" while the other prisoners listen.
• Escape from New York: Cabbie is seen attending a Broadway-esque drag show put on by other Manhattan prisoners. Later he tells Snake that ordinarily he wouldn't spend time in such a dangerous neighborhood, but the show was worth it.
• In The Great Escape, Captain Virgil Hilts and two other American prisoners of the Stalag Luft III stage a 4th of July celebration. A cannon shot is simulated with a trash can and the three men parade around crudely disguised as American revolutionary soldiers, with Hilts playing "Yankee Doodle" on a pipe and a drum accompanying him. There's added irony since they're the only Americans in there and invite the British/Commonwealth prisoners (Allies like them) to the party.
• Jailhouse Rock: After Vince is convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison, he becomes cellmates with Hunk Houghton, who teaches Vince to play guitar. Later, when a national TV network conveniently decides to broadcast a jailhouse talent show, Hunk gets Vince a place in the program. His successful performance sets him up for other music opportunities once he gets out of jail.
• M. Butterfly: In the film adaptation directed by David Cronenberg, the story ends with Gallimard in prison where he puts on make-up and dresses like a Chinese courtesan and performs a version of Madame Butterfly, recounting the plot of the play. Then, in a recreation of Madame Butterfly's ending, as Gallimard reaches the end of his performance, he takes a dagger and stabs himself in the guts for real.
• Muppets Most Wanted: Nadya, the warden of the Siberian Gulag, loves musical theater, so she enlists Kermit to help her organize the prisoners' annual talent show, "The Siberian Gulag Revue." Kermit does a great job directing the prisoners, even though they argue with him as much as the Muppets did, and they put on a perky performance of "Workin' in the Coal Mine." Only during the curtain call does Nadya realize that during the performance, all the prisoners, including Kermit, escaped through a trap door.
• Paddington 2: Invoked. The film ends with Big Bad Phoenix Buchanan getting sent to jail. He accepts imprisonment happily, because now he can act to his heart's content and do musical routines with his fellow prisoners. As he himself points out, "I've always wanted a captive audience!" Later, a closing credits stinger features a scene where Phoenix performs a Busby Berkeley Number with his fellow inmates, and he is clearly delighted while doing so.
• The Power of One (1992): Peekay helps organize a prison concert, in which the African prisoners defiantly Stealth Insult their ignorant white audience. The lyrics to the song they sing are provided below:
  Asambe ba ya memeza (Let's go, they're watching)
  Asambe ba ya memeza
  A re yeng! A re yeng! (Let's go! Let's go!)
  A re yang! Pula e ya na! (Let's go! It's raining)
  Hela! Pula e ya na! (Hey! It's raining!)
  A ya mema, a ya mema (They are looking around)
  A ya thithizela (They are shaking!)
  A yeza nga magwala (They are behaving like cowards!)
  A ya thathazela wema! (They are scared)
  O wenzenjani? (Oh why are you doing this?)
  Wenzenjani wema? (What are you doing?)
  O thithizela
• The Producers: At the end of the film, Leo, Max, and Franz get sent to prison. While there, they write a new musical play, Prisoners of Love, which is even worse than the one they tried to make bad. Leo tries to pull off the same scam overselling shares of the play to everybody in the prison.
• Titicut Follies: The documentary film is Bookended by footage of a grim, disturbing talent show at a state hospital for the criminally insane.

Literature

• Captain Underpants: In the Piqua State Penitentiary, on the night of the unveiling of Warden Schmorden's giant statue, the prison band plays a deeply moving rendition of "Whoomp! (There It Is)".
• "Collectors", a short story by Daniel Alarcón, sees the main character, Henry, arrested and sent to prison where he tries to arrange a production of his in-universe play The Idiot President. To Henry's surprise, many convicts want to get involved, and he ends up having to write new parts to make sure all of them can participate: "Some of these men didn't take rejection very well." Even the toughest prisoners are stunned by the show and give it a standing ovation.
• The Green Mile: Downplayed. As Eduard Delacroix doesn't have any family to visit him in prison on the day that the guards prepare for his execution, the guards arrange for a group of people to pose as members of the press and watch him demonstrate tricks that he had taught his pet mouse, Mr. Jingles.
• Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed updates The Tempest to a prison, where the inmates are performing a production of that same play under the direction of the Prospero Expy. It gets interestingly meta.
• The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally is about a group of convicts in the Australian penal colony putting on a production of The Recruiting Officer as the first play ever performed in Australia. It's inspired by a real-life incident.

Live-Action TV

• In 2 Broke Girls, Caroline's dad does a musical play with his fellow inmates while in prison in "And The Show And Don't Tell".
• Adam Ruins Everything: In the episode "Adam Ruins: Prison", when Adam and Emily's cellmate explain how prisons, particularly private run prisons, make money by encouraging governments to keeping them full, several prisoners wear costumes made of butcher paper and portray characters as the "governor" and a private prison representative.
• Birds of a Feather: "We'll Always Have Majorca" opens in the middle of a Christmas performance by a prison rock band, with Chris and Darryl (who were jailed at the beginning of the series) being part of the band. Darryl is eventually able to briefly escape from jail through a gig with said rock band.
• Brass Eye: Parodied in the episode "Decline". A preposterous news report concerns Real Life Serial Killer and all-around terrible person Peter Sutcliffe being allowed out of prison to produce and star in his own theatrical production in London's West End titled Sutcliffe! The Musical. His lead role "includes singing police chases and finishes with him atoning for his crimes."
• Colditz: In the episode "Frogs in the Well" of the original television series, the British prisoners ask for the boarded-up theatre to be reopened for the sake of putting on an entertainment. The real reason is that there is an escape route via the theatre. However, they don't know that some French prisoners have the same idea.
• Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: In the season four premiere, "I Want to Be Here", Rebecca goes to prison and organizes a theater class for her fellow prisoners. She's the only one who's really into it and cares more about her class than getting out of jail. She tries to craft an original performance based on her fellow prisoners' stories a la Chicago, but everybody else's reason for being in jail is incredibly sad.
• Hogan's Heroes: One episode involves the prisoners putting on a play as part of a plan to covertly get a captured French Resistance member married to his girlfriend so he won't believe his captors' claims that she's unfaithful.
• In Living Color!: A recurring sketch, the "Prison Cable Network" (or PCN), would feature prison inmates putting on various shows and programs spoofing different media formats. Content includes a prison talent show, a late-night talk show, a theatrical show inspired by A Chorus Line, a Win, Lose or Draw-like gameshow, a stand-up comic on Death Row, and more.
• Justified: An episode features a band made up of inmates that is rented out to play various functions; a couple of the inmates take the opportunity to escape, and Raylan must track them down.
• Lewis: In "Old School Ties," Diane stages Julius Caesar while working with prison inmates, with her future husband, convicted hacker Nicky Turnbull, playing Caesar. Lewis and Hathaway track down other prisoners involved in the performance while investigating Turnbull's murder, but it turns out to be a Red Herring.
• My Grandparents War: The documentary television show featuring Mark Rylance includes letters describing the entertainments put on by British citizens held in Hong Kong prison camps during World War II.
• Orange Is the New Black:
  • The final episode of Season 1, "Can't Fix Crazy", centers on the Christmas pageant. It has the characters sing Christmas songs and also perform a Nativity pageant.
  • Downlayed during the improv class in "Empathy is a Bone Killer", which involves everyone performing in pairs for the rest of the class. Alex and Piper get paired together for a symbolic argument about their romance.
  • Inverted in the episode "Litchfield's Got Talent", where the guards are forced to put on a talent show when they are held hostage at gunpoint during the riot.
• Oz: One of the plots in Season 6 is about the inmates at Oswald State Correctional Facility attempting to stage a production of Macbeth. In the final episode, "Exeunt Omnes", the play is staged, and Beecher uses a Not-So-Fake Prop Weapon to stab Vern Schillinger to death during the final act.
• Seinfeld: After the gang gets sent to prison at the conclusion of "The Finale", the final scene has Jerry performing a stand-up comedy routine for his fellow prisoners, Kramer and George included. (Elaine isn't there due to her being sent to a woman's prison.) None of the prisoners, except Kramer, seem particularly amused by Jerry's jokes.
• The Slammer is a talent show that's set in the fictional prison HM Slammer. Contestants are presented as "prisoners" who have been arrested for showbiz-related crimes and are vying to compete in order to leave the prison.
• Tatort: The episode "Borowski und der gute Mensch" starts with some inmates performing a scene from The Robbers by Friedrich Schiller. Unfortunately, this gets out of hand, and one of the imprisoned inmates—Kai Korthals, a Serial Killer—is able to start a fire and use the ensuing chaos to escape the facility.
• Victorious: At the climax of "Locked Up!", Tori and her friends get locked in a prison in the (fictional) island nation of Yerba after slighting the island's chancellor. Tori puts on a musical performance of "I Want You Back" to distract the Yerbanian chancellor while everybody else escapes.

Music

• "Weird Al" Yankovic: In the video for the song "Do I Creep You Out" from the album Straight Outta Lynwood, it's revealed that the narrator is performing this song as part of a talent show in prison, having been incarcerated for his stalker behavior.
• "Jailhouse Rock" sung by Elvis Presley is about the inmates of a prison putting on a band session and playing music.

Theatre

• The Convict's Opera is about a group of convicts on a ship to the Australian penal colony rehearsing a production of The Beggar's Opera to pass the time. At the end of the voyage, they perform it for the ship's captain and crew, and one of the cast members takes advantage of the performance to make a break for freedom.
• Man of La Mancha: The story follows Miguel de Cervantes staging a play based on Don Quixote as he and his manservant await their fates at the hands of The Spanish Inquisition. Cervantes and his manservant play Don Quixote and Sancho Panza while his fellow inmates perform the other roles.
• Marat/Sade: Inspired by the Marquis de Sade's Real Life plays that he would put on in the Asylum of Charenton with his fellow inmates as actors. The work is largely a play-within-a-play staged in the asylum's bathhouse where the inmates dramatize the story of the murder of Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday and frame a debate between Marat and de Sade. As the principal actors are all suffering from mental disorders ranging from narcolepsy to paranoid schizophrenia, and, moreover, as the subject matter of the play is often controversial with the Napoleonic government, there are several disruptions throughout the performance and other obstacles to overcome. Coulmier, the head of the asylum, often has to step in and act as a censor, as he objects to some of the material of the play, framed around the end of The French Revolution.
• Our Country's Good is about a group of convicts in the Australian penal colony putting on a production of The Recruiting Officer as the first play ever performed in Australia. It's inspired by a real-life incident.
• La Razón Blindada (The Armoured Reason): Based on Don Quixote, Kafka's "The Truth about Sancho Panza", and testimonies of political prisoners of the 1976-1982 Argentine military dictatorship (including author Aristides Vargas' own brother), the play is about two political prisoners who meet every Sunday to perform Don Quixote as a way to endure imprisonment, torture, and fear through imagination.

Western Animation

• BoJack Horseman: In the series finale "Nice While It Lasted", BoJack puts on a low-budget production of Hedda Gabler with his fellow inmates.
• Kim Possible: At the end of the episode "Oh Boyz", Senor Senior, Junior is in prison performing a concert for several other imprisoned members of Kim's Rogues Gallery, most of whom do not seem to be enjoying the rather dismal performance.
• The Simpsons: In "Bart Mangled Banner", the prison inmates who have been arrested for hating America perform a talent show. It starts with former president Bill Clinton putting one hundred cigarettes in his mouth. Then the Simpsons perform a musical number about America, which turns out to be a distraction for the guards in order for the family to escape the prison.
  Last Registered Democrat: You guys are on after Al Franken, so the guards will have used up most of their bullets.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "The Inmates of Summer," SpongeBob and Patrick accidentally board a Prison Ship and believe it to be a summer camp. To lift the other prisoners' morale, SpongeBob writes a musical play for them to perform for "amusement and inspiration." The prisoners are initially apathetic but agree to perform once they notice the giant boat prop, which they try to use after the musical number to escape... except it quickly sinks in the water because it's just a prop.

Real Life

• While held in the mental asylum of Charenton, the Marquis de Sade wrote plays that were performed by his fellow inmates.
• When in federal penitentiary for corruption, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was part of a band called the Jailhouse Rockers, which performed at a GED graduation ceremony and on the Fourth of July.
• CPDRC Dancing Inmates is a program at a maximum security prison in Cebu City, Philippines, where the prisoners perform dance routines as part of their rehabilitation and exercise. They are best known for their 2007 rendition of the iconic dance sequence from Michael Jackson's Thriller with over 1,500 inmates participating, as seen here, which was one of the most-watched YouTube videos at the time.
• Prison Performing Arts is a nonprofit that works with inmates to stage performances of plays, providing them with some education in the process. As memorably profiled on This American Life, shows such as Hamlet seem to gain emotional resonance when acted by people who have actually committed violent crimes.

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