Plastic Pumpkins: October 2010

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Comes The Tartan Pumpkin

Awhile back I stumbled across a "Make You Own Superhero" widget at the Marvel Comics Kids site (Can't find it now or I'd hook you up with a link) It was pretty low-tech... a couple different choices of gloves and masks and costumes that you could mix and match and color to your whims. I went with a Hallowe'en theme... surprise!... and created the official defender of all that is right and good with Hallowe'en. Presenting- "The Tartan Pumpkin!"

Thriller

Bloodlass

If she's that easy to lasso with a floaty ring or bean with a see-saw then just go ahead and stake her already...

Portrait Of The Blogger As Ghoul

When all the signs for the Haunted Woods tell you that it is not intended for small children, when the tickets tell you not to bring very small children, when every advertisement and article written about the event tells you that it will be far too intense for young children... don't bring young children. If you want to come, but can't find a sitter then suck it up and stay at home. Know what that's called? That's called being a parent. There's nothing less fun then lurching out of your dark hiding place intending to scare crap and Christmas out of a group of adults and instead finding yourself face to face with a petrified four-year-old. How many times can one ghoul say, "Sorry your mom & dad suck. Hope you sleep again this week."

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

"But Flops Never Die. Flops Never Die."

Horror musicals are rare, but not entirely unheard of. Some musicals with horror-heavy story lines become pretty well known... "Little Shop of Horrors" "Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" and "Phantom of the Opera" as three examples... and some settle quite comfortably into their off-Broadway cult hit niche... "Zombie Prom" & "Evil Dead, The Musical" the second of those two examples being the only musical theater experience from which I returned drenched in blood or at least a syrupy, crimson facsimile thereof. Hail a cab looking like that, I dare you! (Actually, it was pretty easy. New York is weird.) Then there is the horror musical which has the... is 'honor' the right word to use here?... honor of being the biggest flop in Broadway theater history. "Carrie," based on the Stephen King novel, ran for all of five days, lost some $7 million and has become the standard by which all Broadway flops are measured.

When a Broadway show, especially a musical, flops it flops hard. These things take a lot of money to get off the ground and if one turns out to be an early-folding stinker then there are no overseas DVD sales or late night cable reruns to help recoup the cash put into them. A five night run is not unheard of in theater, some shows have been shut down after opening night and some never even make it that far. And many shows run for months and months (and months) before they start that happy process of not losing money. If "Carrie" had just closed early and lost a lot of money then very few people would even remember it had ever existed, but the people who made "Carrie" pretty much managed to define and distill everything that makes for a bad Broadway musical and then crank all that up to eleven. 99.9% of every decision made about the choreography, the set design, the costuming and the special effects was wrong. Many words have been written on what was wrong about "Carrie" and if you are even halfway interested in the subject then I encourage you to go Googling for them. It makes for some fascinating and fun reading. But I'm not here to talk about all the wrongs in "Carrie" I'm here to honor one of the rights.

If you're not big into the musicals and the name Betty Buckley means anything at all to you it's probably because she played the role of Abbey on "Eight Is Enough" back in the '70's or '80's or whenever that show aired and because she played Carrie White's gym teacher in the movie version of "Carrie." If you have even a passing familiarity with Broadway then you probably know her as the beltress of the song "Memory" from that play about the singing kitty cats. But what you really need to know about Betty Buckley is that she is to musical theater as oxygen is to human life. I don't think that I overstate. I have never, never, never ( may I add... never, never, never) heard a bad Betty Buckley performance. Her voice is a beautiful, trilling, powerhouse instrument that makes me shudder with happy every time that I hear it. With the musical version of "Carrie" Betty Buckley returned to the Stephen King story only this time not as the gym teacher, but as Carrie's insane, abusive and religiously fanatical mother. And good golly what a time she had in the role.

I was looking for a nice musical interlude for the Hallowe'en Countdown and I think the horror story background of "Carrie" makes it appropriate for the season. There was no official cast recording made for the show and no commercially produced video. The only recordings of the show that exist today are audience taped bootlegs and the soundboard recording of the show made for copyright purposes. The clip I'm posting today is a combination of both of these things and I'm sure that whoever originally posted them to YouTube didn't have any sort of legal right to do so. Yeah bootlegs are bad, but when there's no commercially available alternative then I figure nobody's losing any money on the deal so what the heck. Slippery slope maybe, but did I mention that Betty Buckley is a goddess of music? If illegal is the only way that I'm going to hear her singing "And Eve Was Weak" then slap the prison stripes on me and call me '24601.'

So a little haunting, holiday music for you as Margaret White goes bible-beating, bat shit crazy on her recently-menstruating and newly-telekinetic daughter...