Theater News

All Over the Map

The Woman in Black in Los Angeles, The Werewolf of London in Dallas, and Witch Lady in Minneapolis

Paul Witten and Joe Hart in The Woman in Black(Photo © Marci Hill)
Paul Witten and Joe Hart in The Woman in Black
(Photo © Marci Hill)

“I love Halloween,” says Ken Sawyer. A couple of years ago, an excited Sawyer drove for 30 minutes to visit a haunted house, paid a $25 admission charge — and was extremely disappointed. “I didn’t get scared once,” he complains. “It was really cheesy and I came out going, ‘God, this place needs a director.'”

Now, Sawyer is creating his own chill-inducing environment as the director of The Woman in Black, Stephen Mallatratt’s adaptation of a book by Susan Hill. The London production of the play has been a long-running hit and is now in its 14th year. Sawyer’s production was presented by The Road Theatre Company in Los Angeles in October of last year, earning four Drama Critics Circle Awards, two Robby Awards, three Back Stage West Garland Award Honorable Mentions, and seven Ovation nominations. After a brief hiatus, the show has now reopened at the Coronet Theatre in West Hollywood.

The play is set in an abandoned London theater. In order to rid himself of a terrible curse, a man hires a young actor to help him tell his story. However, as the play progresses, the lines between reality and make-believe begin to blur. “It’s very Hitchcockian,” says Sawyer. “You get drawn into the story and your imagination goes wild. A door slams, someone screams, and the audience is through the roof.”

Although the production is popular with adults, it has also gained a following among younger theatergoers. “It’s shocking getting so many teenagers into the theater,” says Sawyer. “I love the fact that there’s a whole row of 13-year-old girls in the back holding each others’ hands. And the actors love those younger audiences because they just go crazy; the audience is as much a part of the show as the show itself because they scream and they laugh, and they turn to each other and go, ‘Ha, ha, you got fooled!’ You become involved in the play and in each others’ experience of the play. I think that’s the key to it. In its simplicity, it appeals to everyone.”

********************

Daniel White and Jocelyn Everett in The Werewolf of London(Photo © Rodney Dobbs)
Daniel White and Jocelyn Everett in The Werewolf of London
(Photo © Rodney Dobbs)

For over 20 years, the Pocket Sandwich Theatre in Dallas has been presenting its “infamous audience-participation, popcorn-tossing, comedy spoofs.” The Werewolf of London is the latest such endeavor, written by the theater’s co-founder, Joe Dickinson.

“The spoofs are based on the old ‘hiss the villain, cheer the hero’ concept of melodrama,” says Dickinson. The theater started out by mounting actual melodramas such as The Drunkard and Ten Nights in a Barroom. “They were sort of fun, but those old plays are also really long and boring,” says Dickinson. “So we started doing spoofs of some of the classic horror stories like Sweeney Todd and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

The Werewolf of London is loosely based on Bram Stoker’s The Werewolf of Paris. “I stole some ideas from the book but the dialogue is all mine,” says Dickinson. “I also swiped some ideas from the movies — and boy, have there been a lot of movies! I think there are about 30 or 40 with the werewolf theme. The Lon Chaney movie, The Wolf Man, is the most recognizable one but it [led to] movies like The Wolf Man Meets Frankenstein, Abbott & Costello Meet The Wolf Man, and that sort of thing.”

The comedy spoofs have proved quite popular at the Pocket Sandwich Theater. “They keep us going,” says Dickinson. “Its pure entertainment. We’re not trying to deliver a message or anything like that. We have some people who probably don’t go to any other theater at all except to come where they can be silly and throw popcorn.”

******

Miles Tagtmeyer, Claire Shea, Tara Borman,and Marilee Mahler in Witch Lady(Photo © Bruce Challgren)
Miles Tagtmeyer, Claire Shea, Tara Borman,
and Marilee Mahler in Witch Lady
(Photo © Bruce Challgren)

In the house at the top of the hill lives the witch lady — or, at least, that’s what LouAnne Pig and her friends believe. When LouAnne sprains her ankle while crossing through the witch lady’s yard, she finds out for sure…

Stages Theatre Company in Minneapolis presents a new production of Witch Lady, adapted from a story by popular children’s book author (and Twin Cities native) Nancy Carlson. Stages originally mounted the musical in 1998 and has since received numerous requests for its return. The show has a book and lyrics by Buffy Sedlachek, music by Leanna Kirchoff.

“This is a story in which we learn not to rely on gossip and innuendo,” says Sedlachek. “We really can’t know what somebody is like unless we spend time with them. I like a story in which positive transformations and change can happen, with a good-natured sense of humor.”

Carlson’s book is quite short, so Sedlachek expanded the story. “You look for dramatic opportunities between the lines,” she says. “For example, there is a line like, ‘They all decided to go together to the house.’ There’s a great scene possible there, one in which the children are deciding — which, given the different personalities and the scariness of the destination, can be quite dramatic. And if one uses the deciding scene to set up some expectations among characters, then you have those expectations to fulfill in subsequent scenes, as well as the actions implied in the original material.”

The show incorporates musical styles ranging from a tango to what Sedlachek describes as “a scary sort of habañera.” Although Sedlachek is not making any changes to the script for this new production, director Jennifer Kirkeby has endeavored to give the show a different look. “I completely trust and respect and admire the production team at Stages,” says the author, “and I’m eager to see their work.”

Featured In This Story

The Werewolf of London

Closed: November 15, 2003