Evil Dead: The Musical

"Dying is easy; comedy is hard"? Try both at once. In large part, what makes Evil Dead: The Musical such cultish fun is its dedication to reproducing the original horror films' gore and suspense, woven right into the utterly insane campiness of its silly tunes and raunchy dialogue. They could scare the wits out of you if they wanted to, and they don't mind letting you know it.

After its madly successful production last year, Who Wants Cake? has partnered with Olympia Entertainment and resurrected the musical for another Halloween run, but this time the Deadites have taken to downtown Detroit's City Theatre. With some of the same cast, the same director (Joe Plambeck), and the same creative team, the result is a production that looks and feels happily familiar, but plays out on an enormous stage that set designer Tommy LeRoy makes into a playground for Jen and Ted Hansen's mystical array of special effects. Everything is supersized, from the cabin walls to the knick-knack assortments to the taxidermied moose head, with no drop in quality. Blood fountains, Michele LeRoy's dazzling lighting, sound effects, and an unseen three-piece band exist together in practically perfect harmony with a hardworking cast that captures the delicate balance between homage and mockery.

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Damn Yankees

October is playoff season, and the Encore Musical Theatre Company hopes to spread some of that baseball fever in Damn Yankees (words and music by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross; book by George Abbott and Douglass Wallop). Indeed, many themes of this 55-year-old musical are still relevant to contemporary audiences: the questionable benefits of all-consuming fandom, the rift that sports causes in romantic relationships, and the timeless YANKEES SUCK.

The show's setting really captures a summer-baseball feeling, with Daniel C. Walker's incredible whirling and folding grass-green set plus bright-orange dirt and chalk line accents. Yet with help from his ambitious lighting, the scenes off the field don't feel like they're still on the diamond. Period costumes by Colleen E. Meyer pop with clean, Rockwell brightness. The play is preceded with the singing of the national anthem, and concessions at the rear of the theater call out to patrons hungry for peanuts or a hot dog. It's a nostalgic take on America's pastime, a simpler era when a grown man could sell his soul to the devil, leave his family and work behind, age negative-forty years, walk on with his favorite team midseason as the best hitter anyone's ever seen, lead the Senators to the pennant, and maybe even get away with it all.

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Dracula, A Rock Opera

Meadow Brook Theatre certainly enjoys its spooky-scary this time of year, and indeed, its production of Dracula, A Rock Opera (by John R. Briggs, in collaboration with Dennis West) excels in its moments of fright and danger. The audience gets a glimpse of it in a foreboding early scene in which Transylvanian villagers painstakingly explain to foreigner Jonathan Harker (Eric Gutman) exactly what Dracula is and what he does...if only Harker had listened. However, the play's biggest accomplishment is a thrilling graveyard confrontation between vampire hunters and their prey — the staging and special effects considerably heighten the tension and make for a spine-tingling experience. Director Travis W. Walter clearly knows how to do suspense, and revels in the kill-or-be-killed standoffs between good and evil.

Unfortunately for a production that so champions its action scenes, much of the show feels frustratingly inactive by comparison. Most of the first act concerns Jonathan corresponding with his faraway love, Wilhelmina (Andrea Mellos), and slowly — really slowly — coming to realize what every viewer already knows by virtue of the show title. The story also pauses to concern itself with the marriage of Lucy (Katie Hardy) and Arthur (Rusty Mewha) and her corresponding rejection of Dr. Seward (Caleb Gilbert), a plot point that simply drags in contrast to the exciting parts and has almost no tangible effect on later interactions. The fault may lie in a combination of audience familiarity and format: because the viewer already knows the basics of the story, the details of the performance are what matter, but it's hard to subtly play awakening comprehension when the score requires one to essentially wail it. Rock opera has little room for nuance, which is too bad because several of these scenes feel like marking time without it.

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Season In Review — Hilberry Theatre

Populated entirely by the students of Wayne State University's graduate repertory program in theater, the names and faces of the Hilberry Theatre become especially familiar over the course of a season. This was true even though I missed two of this season's early offerings, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Chekhov's The Seagull. In the absence of these ultimate classic's classics, the remaining four productions offered a variety of styles and moods, from an accessible and well-loved musical to a lesser-known nonlinear think piece that challenged audiences both intellectually and morally.

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The Sound of Music

What audiences generally want from The Sound of Music is the closest possible approximation to the Julie Andrews movie. I don’t intend this as a condemnation; the film is wound tightly into our cultural DNA, and few movie musicals are grander. Deviation from such a deeply ingrained classic is a risky proposition: why jar when one can delight? Accordingly, the Encore Musical Theatre Company and director Barbara F. Cullen chose to play it very safe with this production. Although this is no simple mimicry (among other variations, this staging of the original Rogers and Hammerstein script and score includes three songs that did not appear in the film and omits two that did), viewers who attend the Encore production with the movie in mind should be pleased with its familiar feel.

The complete ubiquity of the play’s songs essentially partners the success of a production with the success of its music, and here musical director Jill Quagliata delivers handily. From the engrossing a cappella hymns of the abbey nuns, led by the glorious voice of Jody Doktor as Mother Abbess, to the accurate several-part harmony of the Von Trapp children, every last song is lush and rich. (It’s a good thing, too, because there were never so many reprises as there are in this musical.) Quagliata also provides piano accompaniment, assisted only by CT Hollis on keys, yet the score never stands out as being too sparse. When there’s singing, which is nearly always, the production swells and delights.

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