Toronto Globe and Mail - Oct 31 2006
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Canadian zombies roam New York
Evil Dead: The Musical first ran in a small club in Toronto. Now it's reborn off Broadway. Can a cult hit find a mainstream audience?

SIMON HOUPT

NEW YORK — Halloween is always a busy time for zombies. So just imagine how full their schedules can get when they also have an off-Broadway show about to open.

This morning on live -- er, undead -- television, the zombie-filled cast of the new stage show Evil Dead: The Musical will bare their fangs at the ladies of The View. In a number called Do the Necronomicon, they'll dance an unusual tribute to the 13th-century Book of the Dead, complete with Michael Jackson-inspired moves and a nod to the Fonz from Happy Days. (Sample lyrics: "In hell we dance our own special way/ Let's show 'em how ya dance while your body decays.")

As darkness falls, they'll take their place on the lead float in the 33rd annual Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. And they'll wrap the day with a late-night performance of Evil Dead: The Musical that should see a man take a chainsaw to his possessed right hand just around the moment the clock strikes midnight.

The show, which heralds from Canada, is a spoof of the 1981 Sam Raimi-directed horror cult hit Evil Dead and its 1987 sequel, about five college students on vacation in a deserted cabin who meet a gruesome fate at the hands of so-called Candarian demons, after they stumble upon the Book of the Dead.

"The film runs this fine line between horror and comedy," says George Reinblatt, who penned the show's script (known as the book) and lyrics, as well as contributed to the music. "You might watch the film and not realize it's supposed to be funny, but it is, and that's why Evil Dead, probably more than any other horror film, lends itself to the musical so well."

Last Saturday night, a handful of audience members in their 20s went to the theatre at the World Stages complex on West 50th Street with their faces painted like demons, suggesting that Evil Dead is attracting a different sort of crowd. Some have intentionally worn white T-shirts in the so-called Splatter Zone, the front two rows of the theatre, which are drenched by the end of each performance in fake blood by geysers that spout from the heads of various characters in the second act.

Bloggers, if it need be said, are having a field day. They are especially psyched that the original hero of the Evil Dead movies, actor Bruce Campbell, will attend tomorrow's opening night and an audience talk-back session on Thursday.

If some audience members go to Evil Dead for the sort of theatrical experience not normally found at, say, a Harold Pinter festival, most of its creators also have little professional stage experience. Reinblatt is a comedy writer whose credits include Rick Mercer's Report. Melissa Morris and Christopher Bond, who co-wrote the music, met at the theatre program at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont. Frank Cipolla, who helped to write the music, has primarily been involved in the arts as a general manager. They are aided by Hinton Battle, a three-time Tony winning actor, who is choreographing and co-directing the show.

"There are so many theatrical conventions and so many unwritten rules that most people generally follow," said Reinblatt, who has never before written for the stage. "I was really new to the theatre and didn't know anything about it. I was probably more influenced by the South Park movies and those types of musicals."

After a couple of short runs in Toronto in the summer and fall of 2003, the show attracted the attention of producer Jeffrey Latimer (Forever Plaid). Even though he had never seen the original movie and is not a fan of horror films, the long lineups of people waiting for tickets convinced him the show stuck a chord. The show played Montreal's Just For Laughs in 2004, attracting the attention of the comedy festival's founder, Gilbert Rozon and his partners, Evi Regev and Bruce Hills, who signed on with Latimer as producers for the New York run.

Like the writers, Latimer and most of his fellow backers are also relative outsiders. Only William Franzblau, who is given the unusual credit of executive producer, is based in New York. All are stepping into an off-Broadway scene lately demoralized by a string of theatre closings. Many observers say it is an even tougher slog than Broadway. There, the risks are high but so are the potential rewards. Off Broadway, many shows that manage to run a year still don't break even.

"We were told about the risk, the one or two shows that make money off Broadway, it's nuts," Latimer said. "However, I think the city right now, from an outsider's perspective, is on fire."

Latimer believes that the unusual appeal of Evil Dead can help it be the exception to the unfortunate rule. Indeed, most of the shows with long runs off Broadway are what would be called "high concept" in Hollywood: Naked Boys Singing (just as it sounds), Slava's Snowshow (which covers its audience in a whirlwind of tickertape) and Drumstruck (a cacophony from South Africa). Those shows don't have the sort of pop-culture credibility to land coverage in Maxim magazine, as Evil Dead managed. (A brief in this month's edition mistakenly -- though appropriately -- referred to the title of one of the show's songs as All the Men in My Life Keep Getting Killed by Canadian [sic] Demons.)

Recognizing that the show will live or die by word of mouth, the producers are insulating themselves from potential bad reviews, offering discounts of up to 50 per cent until late November. "From what I understand from off-Broadway statistics, you're supposed to lose money for months," Latimer acknowledged. "We're in really good shape, we've sold a lot of tickets, and we have a really big advance. That's not supposed to happen yet." Still, he agrees that, if the show attracts only the hard-core fans -- known as Deadites -- it will be dead in the water.

But it may benefit from a little bit of rare Canadian musical magic. The World Stages complex, which comprises five theatres, is where The Drowsy Chaperone had its first New York workshop in the fall of 2004 -- right across the hall from where Evil Dead is now playing.

If the show finds its legs in New York, it may quickly spawn another cast of zombies back home. Latimer hopes to see a production of Evil Dead: The Musical at his Diesel Playhouse in Toronto by March.