On Thursday we managed to get out on the town (thanks for babysitting, Grandma!) and checked out Evil Dead: The Musical playing at the Diesel Playhouse (formerly the Second City theatre).
I am not a horror movie fan, and the clips I’ve seen of the three Evil Dead movies have left me fairly unmoved, but I like musicals, and camp, and it’s gotten great reviews, so off we went. It was as enjoyably silly as I thought it would be—lots of catchy music and clever lyrics (when you could hear them over the unbalanced sound system, that is), interesting staging (just about every object in the cabin set moves) and fine performances all around. Unfortunately Ryan Ward, who originated the role of Ash in Toronto and Off-Broadway, was not there that night, but his replacement Kristian Bruun was excellent (as was Tim Porter, who understudies Bruun’s usual role of Scott. It’s quite the game of musical chairs when someone’s off in that play!). We were not in the famous “splatter zone”, the two rows closest to the stage who get soaked with whatever blood is spraying around the vicinity, but it was pretty hilarious to see the actors simply dump Dixie cups of fake blood right on top of the patrons at stage right. We wondered if the actors knew those people; the local theatre critic got drenched by the bucketful when he dared to brave the splatter zone.
Even though I wasn’t too impressed with the movie clips, I was glad I saw them prior to the show—quite a few of the play’s funnier lines were lifted straight from the films, most memorably Ash’s speech about his “boomstick”. You don’t really have to have seen the movies to appreciate the play; it just adds to the enjoyment to get the in-jokes.
It was interesting to see the play’s audience: Much younger than, say, your average Mirvish theatre-goer—some people our age (the ones who might have seen the movies when they first came out); the rest younger. It was especially telling when we told our mothers (both avid theatre buffs) what play we were going to; they looked at us like we had just announced we were going to a Def Leppard concert.
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Peter says:
April 26, 2008 at 10:09 pm (UTC 0)
And as a person who had enjoyed the source material, it made it all the more enjoyable. The show is more or less a blending of the first two movies with the last scene from the third. Basically. Look, maybe they didn’t say every tiny syllable, no. But basically they said them, yeah. (This is an in-joke)
I did hear Laura giggle when she recognized the whole “Boomstick” monologue–it was worth the previous three days of “education”: me occasionally sending her YouTube links to clips of the movies so she could be prepared.
Groovy.