The Shaffer Show
2010 · School gymnasium (Bluffs / Meredosia)
The Shaffer Show is a fast, joke-packed revue built around a school spring concert that keeps getting hijacked. The director, Shaffer, opens the evening and tries to get his students singing — but he is repeatedly interrupted by Hummer, a loud, mismatched character who comes barreling in through the back of the gym hawking "Peanuts! Popcorn! Fried catfish!" and insisting he has come to fix the music program forever.
What follows is a running comic duel between the straight-man director and the irrepressible Hummer, stitched together with songs performed by the kids. Hummer pulls a handful of students out of the ranks and returns them transformed — first as a bow-legged "Cowboy Choir" trading groan-worthy puns ("Tex" who's really from Louisiana, a tour of the church told entirely in horse terms) and then leading a local parody of "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys" rewritten with the small-town flavor of Bluffs and Meredosia, Route 104, and a Sunday run up the hill to Jacksonville. Between Hummer's stunts, Shaffer reclaims the stage for sincere patriotic standards, so the show swings between vaudeville rim-shot comedy and a genuine spring-concert songbook. The script is written for easy local customization — the town names (Bluffs / Meredosia) are bracketed throughout so any school can drop in its own.
The accompanying cover-letter instructions show how flexibly Ken built the piece: Shaffer can read his lines from a turned-around music stand, a student with a snare drum supplies rim shots for the jokes, and the songs are interchangeable — schools were encouraged to download karaoke tracks of whatever numbers they liked, since several of the songs aren't tied directly to the script.
Musical Numbers
- This Land Is Your Land
- Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys (local parody version)
- America (My Country 'Tis of Thee)
- Itsy-Bitsy Teenie-Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini
- Battle Hymn of the Republic
- My Guy (parody version — "He's my dad / He's my Pop")
- Pretty Woman
- Those Were the Days
- God Bless America
Cast
- Shaffer — concert director / straight man
- Hummer — the disruptive "helper" who fixes the music program
- Cowboy Choir — student ensemble (Cowboy One "Tex," Cowboy Two, Cowboy Three)
- Girl Group / Full Chorus — student singers
Production Notes
Written by Ken Bradbury as a flexible spring-concert revue for school music programs, staged in a gymnasium. The script is deliberately built for any town: the references to Bluffs and Meredosia appear in brackets so a director can substitute the local community throughout the comedy and the cowboy parody. Per Ken's cover-letter instructions, the song list is a menu rather than a fixed score — directors chose numbers and supplied their own karaoke tracks, and a student snare drummer was suggested to punctuate the jokes. A standout original lyric is the "My Guy" rewrite, turning the Mary Wells hit into a daughters'-tribute to dad ("He may be getting older and a little fatter / But he's my dad so it doesn't matter").