Repo! The Genetic Opera: The Interactive Experience
Event: Midnight Surgeons Repo! Shadowcast
Venue: Multi Media Arts Center, Bloomfield, NJ
Date: March 21, 2009
The flier with some Zydrate, (by guest photographer, Frenchie)
D42 often sends me random links to things she finds during hours of aimless internet browsing which she calls work. One of those links led me to a trailer for “Repo! The Genetic Opera”. From that first viewing, the wait began for the eventual limited release of this film (I again thanked the gods that my parents chose to immigrate to New York City some fifteen years ago.)
Yeah, I knew it was gonna be fun, I knew it was gonna be great, but I didn’t realize that it would rouse a following akin to Rocky Horror. I didn’t suspect all the fanfic it would generate, nor did I think the show would go on the road! Of course, all these things happened anyway.
One of the results of “Repo!”’s success is the Midnight Surgeon’s Repo! Shadowcast. These guys came all the way from Philadelphia to add to the film their own, often quirky, interpretation. I’ve never seen anything like this before, and if you’re a shadowcast virgin, you should know that the idea is to have the movie playing in the background, while you and a bunch of your friends dash around in costumes and act/sing along with the bits you really liked. I bet it was a lot of fun to do. It was certainly a lot of fun to watch.
You remember the girl being chased by the Repo Man at the beginning of the movie? Here she is, reimagined.
Fool by Christopher Moore: A Different Take on King Lear
Christopher Moore’s latest book, Fool, is a retelling of Shakespeare’s play King Lear through the eyes of Pocket, the court jester. Being one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, going in I imagined it was going to be hard to find humor in the plot. However, Moore uses the plot, the language, and every situation in the book to fit a joke onto almost every page.
This is Moore’s second re-telling of an old story, his first being Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, which I greatly enjoyed. In this book however, he decided to use an already existing minor character, and develop him greater, instead of making an entirely new character and inserting him into the story. The way Pocket is developed and inserted into the events happening in the narrative, it’s hard at times to imagine him as a minor character in the play.
Going in, I was a little worried that I would have a hard time following the plot since I wasn’t too familiar with the original work, despite being assigned to read it in multiple classes in college (I was never really a motivated student). This was not the case though, as Moore keeps things simple, clearly keeping all characters and titles in order and avoiding traditional Shakespearean dialogue, making it a very approachable book to those not familiar with the bard. Read more »
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