Evil Dead: The Musical

Dec 20, 2006

Last night I saw Evil Dead: The Musical at the New World Stages. In short, it was amazingly ridiculous. The entire show takes “not taking itself too seriously” to a new level. The story follows the plot of Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2, with some of the most popular lines from Army of Darkness thrown in to please the crowd. Though the fourth wall isn’t ever directly broken, the musical is filled to the brim with references to the essence of the whole thing (such as characters acting confused about the choreography they’re performing). And everything is simply done completely over the top, from the incredibly campy lines to the coreography to the immense amount of fake blood and gore.

The writing in particular is just ludicrous. For instance, one of the songs starts with “God damn you bitch / You fucking stabbed me!”, sung in full-on musical style. Everything is like that, taking every cheap laugh and stupid idea to its most extreme extent, which turns out absolutely hilarious if you’re into that kind of thing.

In particular, the guy doing Ash is the spitting image of Bruce Campbell in almost every way. The only qualm I had was that he really can’t deliver Campbell’s lines the way Campbell does, but he tries to do so, which leads to a few lines (such as “Lady, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the store”) that sort of fall flat. But otherwise, he’s just awesome.

Overall, it’s highly recommended.