The theatre event or the Corman film?

Is this still going? I heard it was sold out....

please do report back when you have been, I would love to know what it was like!


best

MLK

A few brief notes, then, about MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, since I've now seen - or perhaps "experienced" is a better word? - this event?

It defies any easy genre classifications, which is probably a strength.  When the blurb says "the performance moves through the BAC" they are not joking.  The entire building - including all its offices, storage spaces, rehearsal rooms etc - has been cleared to make way for this show.  It's a creepy and atmospheric phantasmagoria spread through a labyrinth of about 20-30 different rooms, chambers and halls - each of which has been fitted-out, without any obvious regard to expense, in the style of a C19th gothic horror mystery.  And indeed "gothic" is a watch-word.  The audience are all equipped with grotesque venetian-style face-masks, and are obliged to wear them throughout the show.  This, however, isn't nearly enough for a hard-core of fans, who arrive in C19th garb, or in Hammer-Horror-style capes, gowns, or other fantastickal apparel, and clearly know how the show "runs" in some detail. 

There's no attempt made to depict a "linear" plot at all - you stumble upon different scenes at random, from up to five of Poe's more grotesque stories.  Entrance-times are staggered so that the audience filter slowly into the performance-area, but beyond this very little attempt is made to steer you through the maze...  which is deliberately open-ended in design, and has no "route" you should follow.  In fact, a lot depends on how far you are prepared to wander through closed unmarked doors, up staircases that bear no indication whether they are "part" of the performance or not - you find whatever you find, and nothing is closed, locked, or marked "no entrance".  Even the grimy damp basement of BAC is worked into the performance area...  my companion (a Russian lady of reasonably fearless demeanour) ended-up shaking and refusing to go any further through the basement, so we turned back.  She wouldn't go through the fireplace in the Banquet Hall either, after people emerged from it in an obviously distressed state.

At the "centre" - both in terms of time and space - of the performance is a Music-Hall, the "Palais Royale", which is entertaining but has, errr, very little to do with the plot at all...  in fact it fulfils the function of the "intermission", since there are drinks on sale at the bar (including, of course, Absinthe).  I wasn't entirely convinced about the Music-Hall, but it gave performers who'd previously scared the living crap out of you in other scenes (Hector Harkness, who narrates some of The Fall Of The House Of Usher, and Jack Laskey as Roderick Usher) the chance to let their hair down and sing "What I want is a proper cup of coffee, made in a proper copper coffee-pot" and other Music-Hall favourites. Tom Lawrence keeps a masterful hand on things as the M/C of the "show-within-a-show".  An astoundingly versatile band includes Jim Bennett and Paul Tkachenko - who later turn up as the Band Of Hell in the grand finale.

The entire thing is a mixture of installation, performance art, "happening", historical reenactment, "living archictecture", and drama.  Of course you need to make a major mental adjustment to being "denied" your "beginning-middle-and-end", and instead seeing only chance fragments that you happen on, and from which you have to draw your own conclusions.  This is softened-off by a "grand finale" (to which you are gently "directed" by in-role "ushers") which features some kind of denouement, albeit of a largely symbolic kind.  The result, though, is of a massive, colossal undertaking which must have cost months and months of rehearsals, decorating, planning and implementation - in its own terms this is an astoundingly successful show,  the kind that you never quite forget attending, and which leaves many unanswered questions with you for days and weeks afterwards.

Oh, it's definitely one of those     Although during the rest of last week (before returning home yesterday) I bumped into a few friends who'd also been, and they universally said that it hadn't been as good as "Punch" which the same team had done previously.