YMMV / Mr Burns: A Post-Electric Play

• Genius Bonus: Although a casual knowledge of The Simpsons is all you really need to understand the play, there are a few extras for the consummate Simpsons obsessive.
  • By Act III, Chief Wiggum's name has been misremembered as "Chief Piggum." This is the Malicious Misnaming that Sideshow Bob gave the character in the original "Cape Feare" episode.
  • In Act II, the characters discuss a line from one of their scripts that an audience member falsely claimed to have submitted in an effort to extract payment. While the line is almost word-for-word correct, it's from one of the original Tracy Ullman Show sketches and only appeared in the series proper in "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular." This means that either the Ullman skit has been (deliberately or accidentally) inserted into another episode, or one of the plays in the company's repertoire is a Clip Show containing outtakes and deleted scenes, which would be a hell of a thing to stage (and could point to the fact that the company is struggling, given that popular episodes are highly sought-after and companies with sufficient Weird Currency are able to trade up).
  • Among the familiar tunes that have ended up in the orchestration of Act III is an obvious interpolation of "Meet the Flintstones" with the lyrics changed to be a Badass Boast about the Simpsons. The episode "Marge vs. the Monorail" similarly opens with Homer turning "Meet the Flintstones" into a Bragging Theme Tune about himself.
  • Sideshow Bob's Act II monologue about Bart's unwitting family playing cards and drinking hot cocoa in the houseboat, which winds up being a memorable enough element to leave distinct traces in Act III, actually has no analogue at all in "Cape Feare" and would have been wholly invented by one of the performers, likely to pad time in an episode with a lot of forgotten elements and/or to give more dialogue to a popular character, foreshadowing Act III's substantial Adaptation Expansion.
  • Burns' Act III monologue based on The Night of the Hunter (referenced in "Cape Feare" through Sideshow Bob's Knuckle Tattoos) prominently features the line "I bring you love." These are Burns' Arc Words in the episode "The Springfield Files," in which he's mistaken for an alien while high on painkillers; "The Springfield Files" is said in Act II to be the only play the actors have that features Burns. The same episode establishes that Burns takes on a Sickly Green Glow in the dark due to years of radiation exposure: it's not hard to see how that could have been Exaggerated into his character becoming a Poisonous Person embodying the fallout by Act III.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The opening to the play tends to be a newscast-style report of what happened, switching quickly from event to event as static increases before the power eventually cuts out.
  • Act II has Gibson suddenly go into a Freak Out, ranting over no one really knowing what happened as people in West Vermont suddenly began to die, worrying he and everyone else may have brain damage from chemicals in what they've been eating and drinking, and feeling everything's broken open.
  • Act III's Show Within a Show opens with a recounting of the destruction of Springfield after the power plant explodes, showing familiar characters reacting to the disaster that will kill them all in what has clearly become a kind of public grieving of all the ordinary people who died, complete with the names of the dead being recited.
• Padding: The second act can drag a bit as it has multiple fake commercials that get interrupted due to missing or forgotten lines interspersed with arguing over the point of the commercials, a Nothing but Hits musical number, and time taken to change the sets onstage.

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