About KNOW BEFORE YOU GO

Know Before You Go is La Jolla Playhouse's newest addition to enhance our theatergoers' experience. This online feature gives you complete access to interviews, show information, images and videos designed to give you an insider's view of the production you're attending. Explore Know Before You Go to get exciting information about the world of the play and the artists who bring it to life!




The Story

In a theatrical offering in which he performs 10 roles and sings 14 songs, George Herringbone, a consummate vaudeville song and dance man and raconteur, narrates and guides us through a story that he is compelled to perform every night in order to make sense of a particularly eventful year in his life that changed his destiny.

In 1929, George was a quiet, unassuming and ordinary eight-year old boy in Demopolis, Alabama whose desperate family is feeling the effects of the Depression that is gripping the nation. When George wins a local speech contest, the adjudicator — the surviving half of a once famous vaudeville team "The Chicken and the Frog" — offers to give him private acting lessons. To everyone's amazement, George shows a prodigious talent for singing and dancing, so much so that he is unable to stop.

Lou "The Frog," the other half of the vaudeville team, is a mischievous and vengeful spirit that supernaturally possesses young George's body. Self-described as the "best midget hoofer in the business," Lou's career and life were prematurely cut short ten years earlier under mysterious circumstances, and he has now returned to take center stage. He convinces the Nookin family to go along with his plans until little George and Lou come to a showdown on a fateful night in Hollywood.

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