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music by Frank Cipolla, Christopher Bond, Melissa Morris and George Reinblatt,

book and lyrics by George Reinblatt,

directed by Christopher Bond and Hinton Battle

Jeffrey Latimer Entertainment, Diesel Playhouse, Toronto

May 8, 2007-September 6, 2008

Evil Dead: The Musical is not the kind of show you go to because you like musicals.  It’s an event rather like going to an old-fashioned funhouse.  The music is unmemorable and so are the few lyrics sung clearly enough to understand.  It’s a one-joke show summed up in the title--a musical based on the mostly unlikely source material possible, the first two Evil Dead movies (1981 and 1987), best known for their bad acting, buckets of gore and dizzying direction by Sam Raimi, now of Spider-Man fame.  If you’ve seen the movies your primary interest will be how they will do the decapitation, hand-severing, disemboweling, skull-splitting and other forms of body modification on stage.  If you haven’t seen the movies and aren’t interested in slicing and dicing, even when it’s comic, then this show is not for you.

Conflating the two movies, writer George Reinblatt has five college students drive through the woods to spend the night in the isolated cabin of an old professor.  The professor has been translating an ancient book used to summon a force of evil.  In fact, just playing the professor’s tape-recorded voice reading the spell does the job.  Soon, the evil force is bouncing from person to person transforming them into flesh-eating zombies.  “Look Who’s Evil Now,” is a catch-phrase and song title.  It’s up to Ash, a simple housewares employee turned hero, to save the world with his chainsaw.

This could be fun, and especially in Evil Dead II it is since the story becomes self-mockingly outrageous.  Yet, in the musical, Reinblatt’s dialogue is as unwitty as his book and lyrics.  Attempts to call attention to the musical as a musical are clumsy and he seems to think the height of humour is having a guy repeatedly call his sister a “stupid bitch.”  He aims for “so bad it’s good,” but only gets the first half right.

Exciting performances can help lift a show like this and here there’s some good news.  Ryan Ward, who plays Ash and played him in New York, is as close to the films’ Bruce Campbell as you can imagine.  He’s got the mindless manliness, the manic stare and the milk-curdling scream.  The best part of the show, as in Evil Dead II, is Ash’s hilarious battle with his own zombified hand that is trying to kill him.  Sarah Cornell is also very funny in the dual role of a blonde bimbo and the professor’s learned motormouth daughter.  The rest of the cast can’t sing, acts in sitcom style and doesn’t catch the sense of camp that Ward and Cornell do so well.  It’s difficult to know what anyone is singing both because the actors do not enunciate clearly and because their mics are switched on and off in so haphazardly.

The cleverest aspect of the show is the cabin set designed by David Gallo.  At first it looks like the cheap sort of three-panel set one might find at one of our lesser summer theatres.  In fact, it is crammed full of trick devices that pop into action at unexpected moments.  With a subject like this it’s good the “B.D.S.” (blood delivery system) designed by Peter Higgins and Matt Olmstead is so excellent.  Litres of the red stuff spray over the stage in the finale and if you sit in the “Splatter Zone” in the first three rows you can ask for a poncho.  Most don’t, however, in order to carry away marks of the experience with them.  That is about all that will stay with you since music doesn’t.  The song “Do the Necronomicon,” claims outright that it’s better than the “Time Warp”--but it’s not.  Not one song can match those in The Rocky Horror Show whose audacity this show tries so hard to emulate.                   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-05-09.

Photo: Rachel Fischer, Ryan Ward and Sarah Cornell.