There Will Be Blood: An Exclusive Backstage Peek At Evil Dead: The Musical
Posted March 28, 2008 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Many of us can remember where we were on the night of the infamous blackout of 2003.
Queen’s University theatre student Chris Bond and his friends were outside Toronto’s Tranzac Club, performing an early version of an original production they’d been working on for a year, a campy song-and-dance version of Sam Raimi’s cult classic Evil Dead films. It was opening night, and when the lights went out in the bar they moved the show outside, using the headlamps of parked cars for illumination.
“Instead of opening to an audience of 100 or 150 people we had about 500 people on the street checking us out. It was crazy,” Bond recalls.
Since that auspicious start, Evil Dead: The Musical has grown enormously and even developed its own cult following, with successful runs in Toronto and off Broadway in New York, a recent opening in Korea, and another later this year in Germany. A movie version of the musical may not be far off.
For those not familiar with the ’80s series, it’s about five college kids at a cabin who accidentally unleash an evil force. And though the first Evil Dead film was horror in the classic sense, the second was definitely more camp, and the biggest inspiration for the musical. The current Toronto production at The Diesel Playhouse has just been extended to June and Bond, the co-writer and director, gave CityNews.ca an exclusive backstage tour.
“When we started writing the show we loved the movies. Sam Raimi took horror to a new level, and said (paraphrasing), ‘Let’s not (just have) blood. There’s going to be mountains of it and it’s going to be blue. Let’s make it crazy.’ So the next logical step to crazy is having zombies sing and dance. That’s what we did,” Bond explains of the script and music, co-written with George Reinblatt, Frank Cipolla and Melissa Morris. “You can see his stuff is splattered all over this show. A lot of the script is the original Evil Dead script.”
You’ll hear the word “splatter” a lot in conjunction with Evil Dead: The Musical, and for good reason. The first two rows in The Diesel Playhouse are known as the “Splatter Zone” because of the amount of fake blood flying over the stage and into the seats. Though the red liquid is soap-based and washes out, you might not want to wear anything white, although some die-hard fans do exactly that so they can take their ‘bloody’ souvenirs home with them.
“We had two people in white prom outfits from 1985 in the front row, and they looked great,” says cast member Mike ‘Nug’ Nahrgang, who plays Jake in the Toronto production.
Where other theatre shows have failed in this city, Evil Dead: The Musical has been a notable success, which Bond attributes to the sense of fun and goofiness they have in staging it. Technical director Dan Sheard demonstrated some of the high-tech and low-tech elements of the show – click the video link for highlights – from blood that squirts through holes in the set, to dry ice that fills the stage during a zombie sequence, to blood pouches made using plastic wrap.
“This is a Broadway-calibre performance but there’s still all that camp and fun and Canadian humour,” Bond observes.
Critics have embraced the show as well, with The New York Times dubbing it, “The next Rocky Horror Picture Show.” It’s a comparison not lost on Bond and his company – a ripped Rocky Horror poster adorns the elaborate cabin set, which includes a surprising amount of old-fashioned puppetry. Just about everything on the stage – from books, to the fridge, to a moose head on the wall – is designed to move.
“I was in a performance of the Rocky Horror Picture Show,” Bond says. “I saw this cult audience of crazies who wouldn’t just come once but would come every night. They were huge fans. I thought if I ever write a show I want that kind of cult audience. As a fan of Evil Dead, I’m one of those die-hard fans. That’s a part of our audience, the ‘Dead-ites’ that come every night. But we’re getting that mainstream audience too now.”
Raimi and Evil Dead star Bruce Campbell are both fans, and Campbell has seen the show twice – once in New York and once in Toronto.
“Bruce loves it. He came and did a Q & A after the show,” Nahrgang says. “I think the question he gets asked the most is ‘Could you step in and be Ash (in the musical version)?’ Which is so cool but he’s already openly said, ‘No way, I can’t sing and dance like that guy!'” (‘That guy’ being star Ryan Ward.)
Bond appreciates the leap of faith Raimi took in allowing a group of Canadian theatre students to transform his first major film into something completely different.
“The ironic thing is when he was starting out it was him, Bruce and a bunch of guys fresh out of university trying to make a movie and they didn’t have any money,” he says. “That was us at the Tranzac Club.”
Evil Dead: The Musical runs through June 14 at The Diesel Playhouse.
