BLOOD BUCKET BALLYHOO
With BLOOD BUCKET BALLYHOO Thrillpeddlers, winners of The Guardian's Best of the Bay for 2005, debuts a pair of wickedly dark sex farces by playwright Rob Keefe, plus the West Coast premiere of a true horror classic. The production's penchant for poison gas, acid attacks and botched surgeries leave little doubt why The Guardian hailed Thrillpeddlers' Hypnodrome as the "Best Live On Stage Bloodbath."
In Keefe's play "Lips of the Damned," illicit lovers are locked in a museum of antique torture devices, with sexy and skin-crawling results. The show features an array of diabolical devices, including a scold's bridal, a Victorian funeral cortege (complete with coffin alarm, should the dead awaken), and a frighteningly authentic recreation of the first guillotine, built in 1792. All are put to good use in Keefe's maniacally suspenseful curtain raiser.
"A Slight Tingling," the uproariously blood-soaked closer, climaxes with a sensational Lights-Out Spook Show. Two venerable veterans of the old Spook Show circuit, Steve Conners and Dick Newton, advised Thrillpeddlers in the creation of the show's special effects. Conners was the longtime assistant and now the heir to the secrets of famed Ghostmaster "Dr. Silkini," and Newton toured throughout the 1940s with "Dr. Ogre Banshee's Chasm of Spasms."
As follow up to the wildly successful limited-engagement of "The Drug" (adapted by San Francisco's resident Czar of Noir, Eddie Muller), Thrillpeddlers presents another Grand Guignol "acid attack" thriller as the horrific new centerpiece of BLOOD BUCKET BALLYHOO. "The Final Kiss" (adapted by Richard Hand and Michael Wilson, authors of Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror) is a true horror classic. Jonathan Horton, who created Jeff Goldblum's makeup for The Fly and the special effects make-up and on-stage eye gouging for "The Drug" is on hand to help simulate the devastation of vitriol on human skin. Mel Gordon, America's foremost expert on the history of Grand Guignol theatre, directs with Russell Blackwood.
Also returning are the Hypnodrome's notorious "Shock Boxes" - devilishly renovated - in which audience members will actually feel the show's special effects. Inspired by the theatrical tradition, which provides well-heeled patrons with high-end seats and the Parisian craze for intimate "lodge grille" boxes where, hidden by a grillwork screen, an amorous couple could see the theatre without the theatre seeing them. Oo-la-la! At The Hypnodrome, terror and titillation go hand in hand. The "Shock Box" also gives a nod to the antique art of the theatrical sˇance, the unearthly materializations of spirit mediums and live scare tactics created by movie director William Castle (THE TINGLER and 13 GHOSTS).
Couples craving the ultimate Hypnodrome effect reserve an evening in a DELUX "Shock Box" - gorged with tailor-made thrills and climaxing with a trip to The Hypnodrome's own guillotine and memorialized by the wonder of Polaroid photography.
BIOGRAPHIES (Interviews and photographs available upon request)
Russell Blackwood eagerly produced and directed the first Grand Guignol script he laid his hands on, resulting in his 1991 production of the 1916 shocker, The Laboratory of Hallucinations. "A fiendish terror is loose in the city, courtesy of Russell Blackwood," proclaimed the Bay Guardian. The onstage carnage had just begun. He founded San Francisco-based THRILLPEDDLERS, a theatre company dedicated to Grand Guignol. It produced the American premiere of Clive Barker's Frankenstein in Love, the "Best of the SF Fringe" hit Mondo Andronicus, A Crime in a Madhouse and The Medium in Pretoria, South Africa and, since 1999, Shocktoberfest!!, San Francisco's annual pageant of terror and titillation. Today, Blackwood is a leading authority on this taboo-breaking, blood-spilling theatrical genre and THRILLPEDDLERS is the vanguard of the worldwide resurgence of Grand Guignol.
Blackwood is also a busy freelance director of classical theatre, new works and opera. His productions have played South Africa, Taiwan, London and throughout the U.S. Grand Guignol frequently informs his approach to other genres and vice versa. His "ghoulish and grandiose" Shotgun Players' production of Euripides' Medea, performed in an abandoned movie theatre, spooked delighted Berkeley audiences. Oakland Tribune reviewer Chad Jones found it "as grandly melodramatic as a flickering silent film" and Medea earned a place in the critics' Top 10 List of Best of Bay Area Theatre 2002. Upcoming productions include Thrillpeddlers' Shocktoberfest!! 2005 and Cabaret for Shotgun Players.
Russell Blackwood: 415. 239. 6825 / www.grandguignol.com
Eddie Muller, a native San Franciscan, is a novelist, journalist, filmmaker, and graphic designer, whose work has earned him the nickname "The Czar of Noir." His fiction debut, The Distance, was recognized by the Private Eye Writers of America as "Best First Novel of 2002." It was nominated for the Anthony, Macavity and Barry awards in the same category. His books on film noir, Dark City, Dark City Dames, and The Art of Noir, have been lauded by James Ellroy, Leonard Maltin, Paul Schrader, and many others as the best on the subject, and have twice been nominated for Edgar Awards by the Mystery Writers of America. Muller's NOIR CITY: The San Francisco Film Noir Festival, held each January at the Castro Theatre, has garnered him a "Best of the Bay" honor from the Bay Guardian, and the mantle "Best Local Noir Fiend" from the SF Weekly. He has appeared on AMC, A&E, ABC, and TCM as a film noir expert. Mau Mau Sex Sex, a documentary coproduced and written by Muller, achieved notoriety for its status as one of the first digitally produced and distributed feature-length films.
Eddie Muller: 510. 769. 0884 / www.noircity.com
Mel Gordon is the author of The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror. He is a Professor at the UC Berkeley Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies and teaches directing, acting and the history of theater.
He has written a number of other books including: Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, Hanussen: Hitler's Jewish Clairvoyant, Lazzi: The Comic Routines of the Commedia Dell'Arte, Stanislavsky Technique: Russia (Applause Acting Series), Dada Performance, Stanislavsky: The American Tradition. He is also director of over twenty productions in Frankfurt, Houston, New York, Paris, and Zurich.
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