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Disclaimer:
The reviewers' opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of TheatreLouisville.org. |
Reviews Jake Wheat and Joey Arena Reviewed by Cory Vaughn Entire contents are copyright © 2009 Cory Vaughn. All rights reserved.
The Louisville premiere of Evil Dead is one of the funniest, campiest, most gleefully sophomoric evenings of theatre I've ever enjoyed, and I heartily recommend it on that level. It's rather like Little Shop of Horrors crossed with The Rocky Horror Show, with a little bit of the knowing wink-wink-nudge-nudge sensibilities of Urinetown thrown in for good measure, all done without the catchy, memorable songs. And in case my meaning is at all ambiguous, there are songs in it. Sort of. I'm sure you noticed my quotation marks around the Music credit. Not an accident, that. The songs are not very memorable, they're not even very good as pastiche, and I can't believe it took four people to write them, but they do sport interesting titles, such as "Ode to an Accidental Stabbing", "Bit Part Demon", and "All the Men In My Life Keep Getting Killed By Candarian Demons" (which has to hold some kind of a longest-title world record). Then there's my favorite title of all, the guys' duet-cum-tango called "What the F*%! Was That?", a question I found myself asking through much of the first act (when I wasn't occupied in laughing, of course). I had never seen, or even heard of, the Evil Dead movies before signing on to review this production. My companion had heard of them but had never seen them, either. And even though the stage version was clearly written for and marketed to the movies' substantial cult following (indeed, devotees came from as far away as Michigan for Thursday night's premiere!), we both had a great time regardless, and I'm seriously mulling an Evil Dead Film Festival in the near future. Because it has a largely built-in audience lapping it up, several people have remarked to me that Evil Dead may be virtually review-proof. In other words, I could run the production into the ground spouting every cruel and sadistic witticism in my lexicon if I so chose, and it wouldn't make an iota of difference. How ironic, then, that I actually couldn't help liking it in spite of my elitist self!
The production is housed in the Alley Theatre's new home, a Butchertown complex known as Art Sanctuary. It's an impressive space, which could very easily become Louisville's Mecca for alternative theatre. For this occasion, the auditorium is divided into bleacher seating, cabaret seating, and a few rows of floor seats known as the "Splatter Zone" (by the way, if you're brave enough to sit in the "Splatter Zone", as we were not, they will provide you with a complimentary poncho). Refreshments are sold, including popcorn, wine, beer, candy and sodas, ushers are made up like demons, and classic B-horror movie trailers are shown onscreen during the pre-show seating period. Also projected onto the screen are the sponsor ads and support lines that you would normally find in the program, where instead you'll read more than you ever wanted to know about the Alley Theatre's origins and about Evil Dead, both the movies and the show. The program also doubles as "an emergency shield should the Splatter Zone get out of control." NOTE: In good conscience, I cannot recommend this production to anyone who becomes physically ill at the sight of blood, or any representation thereof. If you don't like looking at it, you won't enjoy getting soaked in it. In case you are one of the other five people unfamiliar with the Evil Dead movies, I'll keep my plot summary simple. Act One: Five college students on spring break have the brilliant idea to break into an abandoned cabin in the middle of the woods, and something (insert creepy movie-trailer voice here) goes TERRIBLY wrong . . . Act Two: The cabin's owner shows up, and absurd complications ensue. That's all you really need to know going in. The audience will fill you in on the rest, because they know every line, every joke, every single gesture before it happens, and when it inevitably happens, there is the knowing applause and cheers. The audience participation element pushes Evil Dead over the boundary between mere theatre and a bona fide event, and at times it's hard to tell who's more entertaining: the actors, or the audience! Director Joey Arena, of Baxter Avenue Morgue fame, has filled the evening chock-full with gory but amusing sight gags, with Ben Rodman's workable cabin set (complete with a destructible bridge) and Rachel French's simple-enough costumes (each reflecting the personality of its wearer) complemented by more than 90 different props by four different props specialists, some of whom have been involved in the creation of the show from its earliest production in Toronto to the present. The highlight is the roughly seven gallons of blood that get shed by the cast at every performance thanks to a computer-controlled release system called the Blood Delivery System Method (try it as an acronym and tell me that isn’t funnier than any of the show’s jokes). Critiquing performances would be essentially pointless, not only because the actors are modeling their characters on the stilted, highly stylized performances you'd find in the B and B-minus movies that inspired them, but also because . . . well, what can you really say about a show where the blood, a severed hand, and an animated moose head upstage everybody? Nonetheless, the production benefits from the priceless antics of the nine geekiest-and-obviously-proud-of-it actors in town, God love 'em. The cast is blessed with an impossibly handsome and pathologically funny leading man named Scott Anthony as the hapless proto-perfect preppie retail employee Ash. Anthony pulls double-duty as the production's Musical Director and sings very well himself. He also magnificently executes a dizzying pas de deux with his own possessed right hand! Valerie Hopkins also performs double-duty, onstage appearing as the pivotal character of droll cabin owner Annie, and offstage directing more or less the best zombie dances since Michael Jackson's Thriller music video. In a not-so-veiled tribute to the late King of Pop, the local bumpkin Jake (Shawn Sloan) even moonwalks, and quite well at that. Hopkins' crowning feat, however, is transforming Annie's bland and spineless boy-toy Ed (a priceless Herschel Zahnd III) into a tapping, crooning post-mortem show-stealer, far more interesting dead than he ever was alive! His showcase song, "Bit Part Demon", is a hilarious, satirical, and all-too-true fourth-wall-shattering lament about his obligatory role as the irrelevant guy who exists in every movie along these lines for the sole purpose of dying. Zahnd's Ed, who will later lead the entire undead company in singing and dancing the climactic "Necronomicon", nearly gives Anthony's Ash a run for his money as the most original and entertaining character in the show. Among the other members of Ash's spring break party, Felicia L. Corbett and Jason Potts are both essentially stuck playing one-note characters (she's the ditzy, slutty blind date, he's the foul-mouthed sex maniac sidekick), but they take their one note apiece and run surprisingly far with it. Keri Baggs, joining us from Hartford, Connecticut, is sweet and appropriately bland as the doomed Perfect Girl; I hope she stays in town for a while because I'd like to see what else she can do. And Rebecca Chaney, playing so far against type that I hardly recognized her, has never been better! I can’t say how, why, or in which role she accomplishes this, but if you only know her from her performances in innocuous musicals at Clarksville Little Theatre such as last season's Thoroughly Modern Millie, stand by to be stunned. I know I was! Together with Neil Brewer (in two hilarious cameos I wouldn’t dare spoil), musicians Larry Bourne (keyboard), Jim Schweikart (guitar), and Todd Zeigler (drums), and understudies Joey Arena and Amanda Kyle Lahti, this is a truly delightful and talented company. And until the end of October, or until somebody writes them a real musical (Please! Post-haste!), they are at the new Alley Theatre, winning over even cranky old misanthropes like me. Join Them . . .
Alley Theatre Running Every Thursday-Saturday in October starting at 8pm
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