Spring Break
'The Living Dead' come to life
Derek Campbell
Issue date: 10/20/08 Section: Culture
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Though this hour-long show is being presented by the Coterie Theatre, all shows are taking place in Crown Center's intimate black box theatre, Off Center Theatre.
On Thursday, actors presented their rendition of the B-list cult classic by George Romero to an optimistic half-full house.
The basic premise of the show is just like the movie: a bunch of zombies are taking revenge on the living by terrorizing them in a confined space on a creepy night.
The cast did what they could with a fairly weak script.
Romero's film has, however, such a place in our collective horror immagination, that we are willing to forgive the occasional poetic license in the interest of a few good skin-crawling moments.
Barbara (Angela Cristantello) spends the majority of the play either screaming or in a shocked silence after her brother Johnny (Spencer Wilson) is attacked and abducted by a zombie in a graveyard.
Cristantello played the facially-dependent part well, gaining many laughs and supportive claps as she played the helpless, frantic damsel in distress.
The rest of the cast with speaking parts did a decent job, but none of the characters really shined in this production.
They seem to mesh well and have a lot of fun, which makes an otherwise painfully cheesy play kind of fun.
Although the play begins in a graveyard, the majority of the play takes place in a house near the place Johnny is attacked, where Barbara meets an assortment of living survivors. The set, though fairly simplistic, functioned well for the constricted content of the play.
A slight mishap with the front door to the house caused it to remain open for a solid 15 minutes, though it was supposed to be locked to keep the zombies from coming in to attack.
Perhaps the greatest achievements of this play were the costuming and makeup elements for the zombie army.
Gashes, stitches and missing limbs decorated a number of actors with their own interpretations of how zombies should move and behave.
The zombie attacks were a bit understaged, however, and took away from what should have been a somewhat scary and suspensful element to the play.
Lacking in horror but gushing with vivacity and good-hearted fun, this show actually is fairly PG - prospective audience members with children or siblings in the double digits should feel fairly comfortable bringing their children, as there is no profanity and the content is fairly mild in respect to the zombie media realm.
At the end of the show, a humorous surprise for pop culture fans awaits.
You can get your tickets to "Night of the Living Dead" at the Off Center Theatre at www.coterietheatre.org or by calling its box office at (816) 474-6552.
dcampbell@unews.com
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