Good Lord! {choke}

I've spent the last few evenings lighting the new show from Nosedive Productions, opening tomorrow:
The Blood Brothers present... The Master of Horror.

These are three short stories by Stephen King adapted for the stage (note: links include spoilers): "Nona," adapted by James Comtois; "Quitters, Inc.," adapted by Qui Nguyen; and "In the Deathroom" adapted by Mac Rogers; all directed by The Blood Brothers: Patrick Shearer and Pete Boisvert (jesus, it's a showfull o'bloggers!). Plus several other short interstitial bits (a couple of them long enough really to not quite count as vignettes): "The Last Waltz," the poem "Paranoid: A Chant," and the wonderfully nauseating "Survivor Type" (which I read aloud on the 1985 Halloween episode of my high school radio show on WNMH, grossing out many listeners, heh-heh-heh).

It's been a fun gig (I had to come in quick and replace the original designer, who got another gig, which is why you won't see my name anywhere on this right now) and an enjoyable show.

I'm a King fan from way back, as uneven as he is (I sent him a fan letter so many years ago that he was still answering fan mail, and I got a personal postcard response from him answering questions of mine and telling me about his upcoming books Firestarter, Cujo, and Danse Macabre), and have always been especially fond of his short stories, which aren't probably his best work, but are great reads that at their worst are still as fun as (and much in the style of) the EC horror comics of the 50s - Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear - with their twisty plots and gruesome comeuppances. Like those comics, which featured The Crypt-Keeper, The Vault-Keeper, and The Old Witch chuckling (heh-heh-heh) over the misfortunes of the poor dumb slobs in their stories, Nosedive's occasional grand guignol shows - they've done two others - have their own hosts, The Blood Brothers (aided in this new show by a Blood Sister, it seems):

So in my viewings thus far of the show, I've been enjoying it at the level of one of those classic comic books, alternately horrified or amused (or both at once). There will be plenty of blood and ichor, that's for sure.

And I'm just geeky enough to imagine which EC artists, who each had a very distinctive style, would have been assigned to each story: "Nona" would have worked done by Wally Wood; "Quitters, Inc." by Jack Davis; "Survivor Type" by "Ghastly" Graham Ingels; "In the Deathroom" by Jack Kamen; and, if lucky, Bernie Krigstein on "Paranoid: A Chant," with wraparound host segments by Johnny Craig. That'd be a good read of a comic book, there.

I can't exactly imitate the look of the books with what I have to light the stories - no lurid Creepshow effects - but at the same time I wouldn't really want to - it's not at all played those comics, though it may feel like them in some ways (that's just inherent in the original King stories).

In any case, I have to work with a somewhat limited house light plot - all house light plots are limited, but this one really comes down to banks of lights in cans on track lighting, with a manual 2-scene preset board. I've added two floor-mounted birdies and two clip lights for some additional effects, but it's pretty bare bones. I've spent years by now though being "the guy who works well with any simple house plot" so I think I got a good look for the whole show out of this. Very noir, which might be expected from me, but the limitations kinda lead to it. Very little color - I've been told I can regel the lights if I really wanted to, but as regelling in this case means removing the gels that are gaff-taped to the cans and sticking new ones on, I thought it'd be best to keep it simple. I've got three colors in limited areas I can bring in - deep red, deep green, and light blue-white - so I'm saving those for special bits and just using the larger washes as elegantly as I can.

Yeah, keep it simple. It's already a headache for Ben, the company member acting as board op, to do the cues on the manual board, with some fast dimmer repatches in there, and a lot of sound cues at the same time, but he turned out to be able to handle it much better than I expected last night (I once had a stage manager/board op walk off a show I was designing/directing when I gave her the cue list and she said it was impossible to run - it was hard, sure, but Berit or I could have handled it fine - and wound up doing so - and Ben obviously could have done that one as well).

Fine cast doing good work here, too, most of whom I don't know. I know Jessi Gotta and Michael Criscuolo (another blogger!) well enough though that when I heard they were in the show, and what stories were being done, I pegged exactly what characters they'd be playing, respectively, in "Nona" and "Quitters, Inc." Jessi also gets to do the solo performance of "Paranoid: A Chant" which is my favorite part of the show - it's my kind of piece and I get to do my favorite kind of lighting for it, which tries to feel like it's coming out of a person's emotions as they flip around, complementing their emotional state.

Well, I'll be on The Master of Horror another two nights and then back home to The Brick to design the next episode of Bryan Enk & Matt Gray's Penny Dreadful and help out on Robert Honeywell and Moira Stone's new musical, LORD OXFORD BRINGS YOU THE SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION, LIVE! - being the necessary and appropriate response to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II's suppression of the freedoms and dignity of the European-American settlers and their descendants in the Royal Eastern American Colonies and the inordinate conferring of special favours and privileges on the merciless Indian savages and the former Negro slaves, in the year Two Thousand and Eight.

But those are later this month . . . first up, opening tomorrow:

The Blood Brothers present... The Master of Horror
at
Endtimes Underground at The Gene Frankel Theatre
24 Bond Street (between Bowery & Lafayette)
October 9-11, 16-18, 23-25, 30-31, & November 1, 2008
Thursday through Saturday, 7.30 pm
$18.00
Tickets HERE

It'll warm your heart. And then eat it, heh-heh-heh.

(Berit is amused by the cover tagline, noting that, to her, a "jolting tale of tension" would be more on the order of "Urgh! I got to get these FORMS in!" and not exactly something on the order of what's depicted here . . .)