At The Mountains Of Slumberland - August, 2007

[collisionwork]

Now that I've figured out a fairly fast system of cleaning up these shots in Photoshop, I thought it was time to get these online, almost a year later.

These are pictures from last August's production of Necropolis 3: At The Mountains Of Slumberland, which ran on the same bill with Kiss Me, Succubus (see yesterday). Pretty extreme palette shift here . . .

This was a pastiche of and about H.P. Lovecraft and Winsor McCay, in which McCay's Little Nemo comic strip character falls asleep (as usual) but this time winds up not in Slumberland, but in the Lovecraftian Universe, and must rely on the help of Lovecraft's dream traveler Randolph Carter to get him home.

As with all the NECROPOLIS shows, the entire soundtrack - dialogue, music, SFX - was prerecorded and played back as the actors mimed to it, in this case with a stylized "posing" resembling the panels of comic strips.

The photos feature Amy Liszka as Little Nemo, Peter Bean as Randolph Carter, Art Wallace as Cmdr. Alfie Bester of The Flying Squad, Aaron Baker as Pickman, Bryan Enk as Capt. Nemo, Gyda Arber as The Sphinx and Others, Sammy Tunis as The Girl and Others, and Linda Blackstock as The Old Woman and Others.

24 photos here, so I'll put them behind a cut . . .

Little Nemo has trouble getting to sleep - he shouldn't have eaten that welsh rarebit . . .

Once in his troubled sleep, Nemo finds himself not in Slumberland, but in a train hurtling through New England, over the Miskatonic River towards the Somnopolis . . .

On the train, Nemo meets Randolph Carter, alienist, who tells Nemo that things are not as they appear . . .

There are portents, child. Numerous auguries. In London, there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. In Norway, a certain seaman who saw things . . . is dead. A youth in the Tau Omega fraternity house at Miskatonic University thought he saw a grotesque and hideous mass of smoke in the air, just as the preliminary flash burst, but his observation has not been verified. There is in the land of Mnar a vast still lake that is fed by no stream, and out of which no stream flows. Ten thousand years ago there stood by its shore the mighty city of Sarnath, but Sarnath stands there no more. It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat.

When a woman on the train transforms into a horrible beast and tries to eat them, Carter saves Nemo and takes the boy with him . . .

Carter explains things to Nemo outside his "Library" of arcane works, which is apparently housed in a self-storage facility . . .

. . . where they are confronted by Carter's associate Pickman, who has been driven mad by his contact with the Old Ones . . .

They were the hellish tracks of the living fungi from Yuggoth. What am I afraid of? Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in antique and shadowy Khem even took the form of man? I remember Yuggoth, and more distant Shaggai, and the ultimate void of the black planets . . . Nyarlathotep . . . the crawling chaos . . . I am the last . . . I will tell the audient void . . .

Pickman tells the story of the horrors he has seen, trying to describe the indescribable . . .

For God’s sake! The pit of the Shoggoths! Down the six thousand steps . . . the abomination of abominations . . . I never would go, and then I found myself there – Ia! Shub-Niggurath! – The shape rose up from the altar, and there were five hundred that howled – The Hooded Thing bleated “Kamog! Kamog!” – in the place of utter blasphemy, the unholy pit where the black realm begins and the watcher guards the gate – I saw a shoggoth – it changed shape – I can’t stand it!
The roaring twilight abysses – the green hillside – the blistering terrace – the pulls from the stars – the ultimate black vortex – the black man – the muddy alley and the stairs – the old witch and the fanged, furry horror – the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron – the strange sunburn – the wrist-wound – the unexplained image – the muddy feet – the throat marks – the tales and fears of the superstitious foreigners – what did all this mean? To what extent could the laws of sanity apply to such a case?

Carter takes mercy on Pickman and puts six bullets in his head, then takes his notes, telling Nemo that the faculty at Miskatonic University can't deny that he was right now, even that fool Wingate Peaslee!

In the library - which is much bigger on the inside than the outside - Carter loads Nemo up with books . . .

Including the infamous, monstrous, forbidden, dreaded, abhorred, unmentionable, and hideous Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius’ Latin version, as printed in Spain in the seventeenth century . . .

They must call up and try to control one of The Old Ones to find out what they want . . .

. . . which they do, but are barely able to keep it bound. Their spell to send it away hurtles them through a wall into the Electrical Panoply of Carter's friend, Commander Alfie Bester of The Flying Squad . . .

Poppycock! There are no beasties and ghoulies in the night. All that there is, was, and shall be has a rational and scientific explanation, doubtless electrical in origin. These beings exist all right, but as mere mortal aliens from worlds other than our own, not as squamous hellions from the infernal stygian depths.

Despite his disagreement with Carter on the origin of the monsters, Bester agrees to help, and takes Nemo and Carter up in his autogyro . . .

. . . where they are attacked by a flying creature.

On the ground, Nemo and Carter have lost Bester, and arguing over how to proceed, split up, as Nemo attempts to help a starving girl on the streets of Somnopolis, returning home with the girl to her house and mother, who call up a beast to devour Nemo . . .

. . . only to find it is a trap, and the mother and daughter are agents of The Old Ones . . .

Carter appears in the nick of time and rescues Nemo, then on the street, explains that The Old Ones want possession of The Black Stone, a mystical object that allows passage between dream-worlds . . .

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

Carter explains that he has lost the key back to the real world and is now permanently a resident of the dream-world, then is taken by some of the beasts that work for The Old Ones, slipping The Black Stone to Nemo before he is gone.

Nemo must go on alone to the Martense Mansion, where the evil dwells, and is confronted by a Sphinx that guards the gate . . .

Defeating The Sphinx with logic, Nemo discovers that it is merely a false front to an immense subaquatic vehicle, commanded by the ultimate villain who wants to bring back The Old Ones, Captain Nemo!

. . . who brings Nemo to a dark place . . .

. . . where Carter is bound and guarded by monsters.

Capt. Nemo forces Carter to tell him the necessary passage from the Necronomicon that will bring The Old Ones back (or he will have the beasts kill Little Nemo), then he reads the passage, and all seems lost as The Old Ones begin to return . . .

. . . when Bester appears with one of his electrical devices and destroys the monsters (not before receiving a mortal blow himself).

At the right moment, Nemo smashes The Black Stone and Nemo and his monsters are destroyed.

Bester dies from his wounds, and Carter finds a key in the remains of The Black Stone - a key that will allow him passage to any time and any world he pleases (except our "real" world). He says a sad farewell to Nemo, and sends Nemo back to his bed in the real world . . .

. . . where he awakes, trying to describe to his mother what a strange dream he had.

Nemo ends the play by describing what he thinks has happened to Randolph Carter since . . .

There is talk of apportioning Randolph Carter's estate among his heirs, but I shall stand firmly against this course because I do not believe he is dead. There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine; and from what I know of Carter I think he has merely found a way to traverse these mazes. Whether or not he will ever come back, I cannot say. He wanted the lands of dream he had lost, and yearned for the days of his childhood. Then he found a key, and I somehow believe he was able to use it to strange advantage.

I shall ask him when I see him, for I expect to meet him shortly in a certain dream-city we both used to haunt. It is rumoured in Ulthar, beyond the River Skai, that a new king reigns on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, that fabulous town of turrets atop the hollow cliffs of glass overlooking the twilight sea wherein the bearded and finny Gnorri build their singular labyrinths, and I believe I know how to interpret this rumour. Certainly, I look forward impatiently to the sight of that great silver key, for in its cryptical arabesques there may stand symbolised all the aims and mysteries of a blindly impersonal cosmos.

Is it time to call a certain someone for their birthday yet . . ? Ah, maybe I'll wait a couple of hours to be sure they're not sleeping in . . .

Comments

Al Bester, teen heartthrob

[justjohn.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about Walter Koenig, due to all the publicity his Star Trek character's fellow officer (I was going to type "seat mate," but that would have sounded like an attempted joke) has gotten with his recent marriage.

Back when the show originally aired, I was a kid and my sisters were teens. And to them and their cohort, the two dreamiest Star Trek characters were Chekov and Spock. Chekov started strong because of his "Beatle hair cut," but Spock was marketed better.

Of course, that makes me feel really old, right about now. You ever notice how much of the programming on the "SciFi" Channel is sponsored by Depend adult undergarments?