It’s elaborately produced, but why?
Night of the Living Dead Live, which opened April 26 at Theatre Passe Muraille, winds up being as redundant as its title.
I can’t think of the last time I saw a show open at TPM with a giant counter available to purchase show-related items, but that should give you an idea what this show is all about. It’s eyes on the box office, pure and simple.
George A. Romero’s 1968 film didn’t quite create the zombie franchise (there had been zombie movies since the1940s), but it did set the form in many ways.
Shambling monsters, clueless humans, lots of gunshots and gore. Watch it closely and you can see The Walking Dead, in all of its high-tech sophistication, emerging from behind Romero’s primitive work.
Chris Harrison, Phil Pattison and Marty Brithelmer, a trio of self-confessed “Hamilton film geeks” decided to bring the Romero film they loved so much to the stage.
They enlisted Chris Bond, director of Evil Dead: the Musical, who added Trevor Martin and Dale Boyer to the writing team and away they went.
The problem is that I don’t really know what they wound up with. The show has been elaborately produced, with really first-rate attention to all the technical details.
But what’s up there is, in Act I, pretty much a recreation of the Romero film.
It’s all in black and white, giving it a kind of spurious chic and the sound effects are slickly co-ordinated. Still, you start to ask “why”?
The sexism and racism of the original are winked at and the Costco School of Acting style the original players adopted is embraced by the cast. Some of them, like Mike “Nug” Nahrgang and Darryl Hinds, know just how to spin the material, but most of the others mug like they’re in a bad Second City show in the final weeks of its fun. Matters grow more pointless when Act II just offers us an endless series of “what if” re-enactments of how the story could have worked out with different formats. If you can picture Romero remaking Rashomon, you’ll get an idea of how weird this is. Some of the jokes are funny, but you see them shambling slowly toward you from a great distance, just like a zombie. And by the time they try to bring everything to a zappy ending with a musical number, the strain shows. Evil Dead: the Musical was so good because it found new life and ener- gy inside a musty old film. Night of the Living Dead Live just keeps breathing in the musk of old campy yesterdays which gets suffocating. Some people are going to love it, like the guys in biker gear who spent intermission next to me on the sidewalk, announcing how many months ago they had bought their tickets, how much swag they were going to purchase, how many tequila shots they were planning to down and how thrilled they were to see Romero in the audience. If that sounds like your dream date, then go right ahead. You’ll probably find me somewhere else, with the living, not the living dead.