Like the movie, the stage version of Singin’ in the Rain is about making movies; specifically, that tumultuous period when Hollywood was making the somewhat painful changeover from silent films to “talkies”. Careers came to an abrupt end when it was discovered that those gorgeous faces had impossible sounding voices. Lina Lamont, the prototypical dumb blonde, is a compendium of every casualty of the period. Although the characters and incidents are all invented, much of what takes place on stage echoes actual events in those early days of Hollywood
The plot not only lovingly mocks the Hollywood that was, but also the corny conventions of the staple boy-meets-girl film musicals the studios used to crank out in the late 20’s and early 30’s. Many of the, now hilarious, techniques of the early “talkies” have been retained, such as the actors walking to a vase to speak a line because that's where the microphone was hidden. Problems caused by the sound equipment used in those early movies are also highlighted in this new stage version of the film. Footsteps, paper crackling, and beads rattling sounded like thunderstorms through those early microphones and the stilted dialogue of the silent films created disasters when the same dialogue was first used in the “talkies”. Dialogue would occasionally be out of sync with what the characters were actually saying as sound was actually cut on a wax record which often became scratched and would sometimes speed up or slow down.
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