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

book and lyrics by George Reinblatt

Starvox Entertainment, Randolph Theatre, Toronto

October 29, 2013-January 11, 2014

“Let’s Do the Time Warp Again”

   

The production of Evil Dead: The Musical at the Randolph Theatre is the first Toronto has seen since its 300-performance run at the now-defunct Diesel Playhouse in 2007-08.  The news is a mix of good and bad.  The good news is that the dialogue is tighter and funnier and that the on-off miking problems that plagued the 2007 production are gone.  The bad news is unexpected.  Ryan Ward, who returns to play the lead, seems to be phoning in his performance, the sound system is not balanced and the special blood-spraying effects – the entire raison d’être of the show – are now as well done as in 2007. 

For those unaware of the background, Evil Dead is based on a trilogy of films (1981, 1987 and 1992) by Sam Raimi that simultaneously fulfill and mock the conventions of the horror movie genre.  The musical follows the same path by having the same kinds of numbers – introduction songs, duets, choruses – that one might find in a musical while mocking the conventions both of musicals and horror movies. 

Book writer George Reinblatt has focussed primarily on the film Evil Dead II and 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, the Necronomicon Ex Mortis, once used to summon forces of evil known as Candarian demons.  In fact, when the college kids find the professor’s tape recorder and just playing his ill-advised attempt to demonstrate how the spell is pronounced, the spell takes effect.  Soon, the evil force is bouncing from person to person, and even object to object, transforming each into flesh-eating zombies.  “Look Who’s Evil Now,” is a recurring catch-phrase and song title.  Once all his friends have been infected, it’s up to Ash, a simple housewares employee at S-Mart, to save the world with his chainsaw.  Meanwhile, the professor’s daughter Annie is on her way to the cabin with a spell that can banish the evil force through a rift in time.

Corey Ross, president of Starvox Entertainment that is behind the new productions, says, “It’s a show everyone loves – even if you don’t love musicals”.  It would probably more accurate if he said, “It’s a show everyone loves who does not love musicals”.  If Anything Goes (1934), The Sound of Music (1959), Fiddler on the Roof (1964) or A Little Night Music (1973) are your idea of great musicals, then Evil Dead is not for you.  It’s a show whose main interest lies not in character or musical expression but in stage effects simulating decapitation, maiming, disemboweling and scalping.  But Evil Dead is not without precedent.  The Rocky Horror Show (1973) and Little Shop of Horrors (1982) are stepping stones to it.  The leap that Evil Dead makes is in bringing full-blown Grand Guignol into the realm of the musical.

Director Christopher Bond of the 2007 production is back at the helm and has the tricky assignment.  Part of the charm of the 2007 production was its deliberate tackiness.  The five college kids arrive carrying cardboard cutouts to represent their car and cardboard cutouts of cartoon animals slide by a simplistic drop of a road to give the impression the car is moving.  The problem is how make the special effects more impressive while still retaining the low-budget so-bad-it’s-good ethos of the show.  Here the production signally fails.  The so-called “blood delivery system” of the 2007 show was much more realistic than that of the revival.  When Ash cuts off his own infected hand, a thin arc of blood spurts as if he’d turned on a red-water drinking fountain.  Even worse, when Ash is compelled to slice through the decapitated head of his girlfriend Cheryl, we ought to get more blood but instead get the same thin arc just at a higher pressure.  In the concluding zombie massacre when the Splatter Zone (the first three rows of the audience) get drenched in blood, the blood really should come directly from the wounded zombie themselves.  It does in part, but Bond cheats by using half a lawn sprinkler downstage centre aimed at the audience and worst of all by using overhead sprinklers at the climax.  The point of the Splatter Zone is to get wet with the blood of the characters, not just to get wet. 

The show could be a lot of gross-out fun but it still has to be done well.  The main surprise of the evening is that Ryan Ward, whose character Ash is the show’s hero, gives such a muted performance.  On the one hand, on opening night he was literarily muted because his mic was oddly set at a lower volume level than the others.  On the other, Ward seems to be sleepwalking through the part, mumbling his one-liners in a desultory fashion and waking up only to do a few poses and his great set piece of fighting against his own evil-infected hand.  Until like the manic brio he gave to the part in 2007, a sense of unenthusiastic routine has crept in that leaves the show with a gap where its source of energy should be.

The best performance of the evening is that of Laura Tremblay.  As Ash’s friend Scott’s girlfriend Shelly, is hilarious as ultimate caricature of a dumb blonde.  As the professor’s daughter Annie, she is funny as an egocentric know-it-all.  The portrayals are so distinct you initially believe two different actors are playing the roles.  Tremblay also has the best voice in the cast and makes her 1950s-style pop lament “All The Men In My Life Keep Getting Killed By Candarian Demons” the musical highlight of the show. 

The next-best performance comes from Daniel Williston as the country guy Jake who leads Annie and her henpecked boyfriend Ed to the cabin.  His song “Good Old Reliable Jake” did not stay long in the memory in 2007, but it does now since Williston delivers it with such fervour. 

Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll makes a suitably comic impression as the archetype of a horny teenaged male who would be as much at home in movie like Porky’s.   As Ash’s girlfriend Cheryl, Alison Smyth has little to do but play the cardboard part of the “nice” girl changes into the cardboard part of the “evil” demon.  Margaret Thompson shows such spunk and such a strong voice as Ash’s bookish sister Linda, it’s too bad her character has to turn into a tiresome punning jack-in-the-box demon so early in the show.  Kenton Blythe mines what humour there is in the character Ed, whom Annie prevents from ever speaking.  He performs his big number “Bit Part Demon” well enough.  It’s just a pity the song itself is so unmemorable.

The current production of Evil Dead does have the same sound problems as the 2007 version.  Unfortunately, it just has different ones.  Now the balance between the apparently prerecorded background instrumentals and the onstage voices is off kilter, with the instrumentals frequently drowning out the voices.  Since only Tremblay and Williston have excellent diction, many of the show’s lyrics go missing. 

The demon’s song “Do the Necronomicon” invites direct comparison with The Rocky Horror Show by claiming that it’s like the “Time Warp”, only better.  Sorry, it’s just not as catchy and the dance steps are too messy.  The song only reminds us that Rocky Horror depends mostly on acting and singing to make its impression rather than on a specially rigged set, blood-pumps and demon masks.  One might have thought that for this production Evil Dead, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the show’s unveiling in 2003, that the producers would try to improve both the singing and acting as well as the special effects to present the best possible version of the musical.  It’s quite a disappointment that they haven’t.        

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from  top) Ryan Ward and Laura Tremblay; Daniel Williston, Margaret Thompson, Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll, Alison Smyth and Kenton Blythe. ©2013 David Hou.

For tickets, visit http://evildeadthemusical.com/toronto/.