EVIL DEAD: THE MUSICAL (above) anoints the boards of the Count Basie stage Tuesday.
Arriving just in advance of Halloweekend — and representing the most gloriously gory musical-theater casserole since Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett made mincemeat of the Broadway playbook — Evil Dead: The Musical slips and slides its way onto the stage of the Count Basie Theatre for a one-night stand in Red Bank this week.
Playfully adapted by book writer and lyricist George Reinblatt, it’s a visceral vaudeville drawn from the never-really-serious (but seriously gruesome) horror film franchise that jumpstarted the Hollywood career of director Sam Raimi, and made an unlikely cult-movie star of Bruce Campbell.
All the signifiers of the 1981 original (and its even more frenetically kinetic sequels) are present and accounted for, as heroic-by-default store clerk Ash single-handedly (or chainsaw-handedly) faces down an onslaught of demonic zomboids, bad-ass trees, an accursed tome, uncooperative body parts, interdimensional time-slips and some of the deadliest one-liners ever devised.
Take it here for seating ($39 – $75) at Tuesday’s 8 pm performance — and take note that the top-ticket price places the theatergoer squarely within the Splatter Zone: a poncho’d precinct that promises an even more interactively juicy experience than Gallagher and his watermelons.
