Several years ago, my friend Max and I, who really had little involvement in Yale theater outside talking to the theater people in the Glee Club, decided we would put on a musical. Not just any musical, no - we would be the very first people to stage the so-called "cursed" musical based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft, A Shoggoth on the Roof.
It's cursed because no one has ever been able to do it. No, Great Cthulu doesn't make a guest appearance and kill the cast with his tentacles the night before the show, though that might make for a better story. The truth is that the nice folks who retain the rights to Fiddler on the Roof won't let anyone perform Shoggoth because the music is exactly the same, albeit with Lovecraftian lyrics.
We assumed we could get around this without a legal team - how much harm could a couple of college students do, anyway? - but while I wrote to the Fiddler people to ask permission (Yale has this thing about intellectual property), my amazing Fellow, Eytan, actually paid for a copy of the book and the CD. He read it first, then told me, in so many words, that it's crap. Since Eytan knows quite a bit about scripts, I took his word for it, and the firm refusal from the Fiddler legal team sealed our doom. No Shoggoth for us, which, considering my directorial debut with A Child's Christmas in Wales and the Let's-strip-in-front-of-Dean-Salovey scene, was probably a good thing. The Shoggoth kit is now languishing in the back of my closet, just in case.
Eytan, I didn't think it was possible, but I've found something worse. Enter Xenu is Loose! Cower Puny Humans as the Dark Prince of the Galactic Federation Rains Atomic Death Once More Upon Your Pitiful Planet - The Musical!
I had such high hopes for this production, but it fell flat on its purple face. Xenu was great, campily evil with wrist blasters and platform boots, but the rest of the cast seemed plucked from a high school stage. They kept mumbling their dialogue, sent up blasts of feedback from their microphones, and seemed about as wooden as a log. Much of the music was provided by two guys in plainclothes who stood like bookends on either side of the stage, calmly playing their electric guitars while Xenu and crew shot at each other with laser blasters. One of the few good moments was a surprise visit from Tom Cruise, but Xenu dispatched him all too quickly. In all, this was a major disappointment, and made me reconsider our decision to scrap Shoggoth.
Max? Doing anything important?
No comments:
Post a Comment