Return of The Deadly Penguins

Well, obviously that scratcher was just another piece of paper...

Since I last posted a few of months ago, things have been a bit of a whirlwind. Things pop up and schemes change.

I had a chance to put up a stage production of Night of the Living Dead and I took it. Since there's not a script floating around (a whole lot of winging it from the original cast of the flick, I hear tell), I had to transcribe a script from the film and then adapt the narrative to fit the limitations of the stage. Due to casting restraints, had to tweak the characters.

Turned out to be a fifty-minute one act, but the sucker moves pretty well that way... no Barbra wandering around the house for five minutes, no ten-minute radio broadcast playing as Ben boards up the joint. Basically, get Cooper and Tom bursting in from the cellar within the first ten minutes and keep the puppy rolling. I had to drop the first in-house zombie attack due to pragmatism (two week rehearsal schedule), but otherwise it turned out well. Here's the final performance of Night of the Live Dead... although closing night also means actors getting a little creative with the material. And the closing scene also illustrates one of the hazards of live theatre... although the audience got a kick out of it, so there's that.

Meanwhile, back to The Deadly Penguins...

I finally got the stage for it, and I've assembled a great cast. Now, I wrote the thing, so what's left of my modesty says that I'm not gonna guarantee that it's the funniest show of the year... but I've got a intuitive cast, so there's the potential.

As I've mentioned before, it's a bawdy spoof of the old B-monster movies of the Cold War era, in the style of Mel Brooks and early Zucker Brothers... with the unfiltered humor of the Scary Movie franchise.

Of course, due to the inherent limitations of the stage, only about 55 pages of the 108 page screenplay translates to stage. To counter, I had to re-write the ending. So it goes.

The show opens May 14th at the Blue Room Theatre in Chico, CA. Runs through the 30th. And as planned, when the show wraps we’re gonna jump straight into shooting it as a low-budget movie.

We'll see. Some fund-raising tactics in mind to raise the $2,500 budget, so I’ll get back on how that goes.