When it comes to selling tickets, or books, or kitchen spatulas, we all know that Sex Sells. Well, amend that. So does Blood.
"Evil Dead: The Musical" drew a far larger crowd to Tower Grove Abbey last night for the Stray Dog Theatre opening-night performance of "Evil Dead: The Musical," than for many opening nights. And the crowd skewed younger, not quite balanced by parents and grandparents. Many paid a premium to sit in the front rows where they received a good dose of straying, spraying stage blood and a T-shirt to absorb it. And in a welcome display of poise and maturity, no one in the audience went into standing-ovation mode. It was good, silly entertainment, nicely played, but it didn't deserve a standing ovation, which has become so common among St. Louis audiences as to be absurd. Unless you have to leave in a hurry for some reason, just stay and enjoy the curtain calls and applaud for a little while.
There isn't a serious moment in the play, of course, and there were overtones of "Rocky Horror" and Monty Python, certainly good writing to borrow. "Do the Necromonicon," for example, is a lot like the time warp. The puns are Pythonesque, as the language is David Mamet-esque. Lyricist and book writer George Reinblatt even puts an homage to Mamet in a rowdy song, "What the F--- Was That?" though I do not recall him finding a rhyme for the Anglo-Saxon word. In my vocabulary, it's a verb, though Mamet, Reinblatt and many more of today's writers seem to prefer it in its adjectival form. (It also contains the only song ever, to my knowledge, to discuss Fallopian tubes.)
Frank Cipolla, Christopher Bond, Melissa Morris and Reinblatt are credited with the music, Chris Owens directed nicely, using 10 actors well on the small stage, and Joe Dreyer served as music director and led the trio, which included guitarist Billy Croghan and drummer Sean Lanier. "Evil Dead" goes back to the movie series that began in the 1980s and morphed into a musical that began in Toronto in 2003. It now has played around the world, and undoubtedly has only begun a series of circumnavigations.
The action features a shotgun with an unlimited load of shells, a chainsaw, an axe, a knife and some people. They're young and enthusiastic and loud, and the sound design is undoubtedly responsible for the latter. Ash (Gregory Cuellar) is the leader of the group, off to a weekend at a cabin with his girl friend, Linda (Julie Venegoni), a couple of their friends, Shelley (Laura Coppinger) and Scott (Antonio Rodriguez), and Ash's kid sister, Cheryl (Anna Skidis, with a fine sense of timing). Why a kid sister? Ask the playwright. Maybe he has one.
Annie (Stephanie Merritt), whose parents own the cabin, and her boy friend, Ed (Ryan
Cooper) arrive later with Jake (Steven Castelli). Matt Anderson and Ben Watts round out the cast, with Anderson a delight as the Moose.
Cooper provided a high spot with "Bit-Part Demon," Cuellar and Rodriguez competently handled the bad-language duet, Castelli, Cooper and Merritt sparkled with "Good Old Reliable Jake," not to be confused with "Good Old Reliable Nathan" in "Guys and Dolls," and Cuellar, Merritt and Castelli are much fun as Merritt laments, "All the Men in My Life Keep Getting Killed by Candarian Demons."
Both Cuellar and Venegoni work at a store called S-Mart, patterned after you-know-who, and they do a delightful duet and its reprise over how they meet and court in the store, where she's a cashier and he's in housewares; some of Reinblatt's better lyrics turn up in this number. Given the activities and the extensive use of puns, I expected that some of the characters would take advantage of a chain-saw incident to call Cuellar "Lefty," but it was not to be.
Young, energetic actors are the best kind for a show like this and they have worked hard under Dunn's direction. That doesn't make the evening less silly, but it does make it more fun.
Evil Dead: The Musical opened last night as a Stray Dog Theatre production at the Tower Grove Abbey, where it will run Thrusday-Saturday through Oct. 30
--Joe
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