Vamp meets camp at Playhouse

Published 1:00 pm Thursday, April 1, 2004

BPA Theatre School’s new production spoofs ‘50s sci-fi films, Broadway musicals.

Give me a “V,” give me an “A,” give me an “M, P, I ,R, E.”

Together, that spells “I Was a Teenage Vampire,” Bainbridge Performing Arts Theatre School’s new show, in which the cheerleaders turn ghoul and other high-schoolers suffer a similar fate at Black Cloud High School in 1953.

The flavor of the original script by Theater School director Steven Fogell is high camp, an echo of sci-fi movies of the 1950s and 1960s, like “Creature from the Black Lagoon” and “I Was a Teenage Werewolf.”

“In those movies, everything always happened to a group of high school students, and it was funny because most of the time they were adult actors playing high-schoolers,” Fogell said.

In his adaptation, co-directed by Shelley Long and Deirdre Ray, the actors are younger than the part, with the theater school’s 30 fifth- through ninth-grade actors divided into high school cliques – the freaks, the geeks, the cheerleaders and the jocks, transformed into filmic archetypes.

The script called for acting that was over the top, in line with the melodramatic movies being emulated.

But Fogell found that conveying what “camp” means to young, inexperienced actors was not easy.

“It’s hard, because at their age, there’s not a lot of places for them to see (camp) and it’s usually what I try to get actors not to do, to go to that place,” he said.

Fogell showed the young actors some camp reference points, like the movie “Grease,” while avoiding material too advanced for the age group.

He talked with the group about voice quality that might be too “straight” and ways of reading lines that might better convey ironic intent.

“Some of them got it right away,” Fogell said, “but others have had difficulty understanding that kind of humor.”

Hannah Crichton – a familiar stage presence at the Playhouse, with nine productions to her credit – plays lead Connie Bane with a natural flair, delivering lines like, “You leave my family alone, you flying bimbos,” delivered to the corps of vampire cheerleaders with just the right twist.

“It’s fun to do campy stuff,” Crichton said.

Contributing to the play’s atmosphere of ironic nostalgia are Broadway standards with new lyrics by Fogell and Long. A familiar ballad like “The Sun’ll Come Out” from the musical “Annie” becomes a song a vampire has to love:

“The sun won’t come out tomorrow, bet your ghoulish heart that tomorrow, there won’t be sun…

“Tomorrow, tomorrow, I’ll eat ya tomorrow, you’re only a meal away.”

The ploy works well, because the tunes’ familiarity flattens the learning curve for the actors, many of whom are new to BPA.

“Shelley is a good teacher,” Crichton said. “The good thing was I knew almost all the songs for this. But for other people, she just does it over and over until they get it.”

Crichton’s familiarity with the music has an another dimension; she is related to songster Richard Rogers, who, with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, composed many of the songs adapted for the show.

“I’ve had Hannah in the program for years and years, and I always made jokes about those (Rogers and Hammerstein) shows,” Fogell said.

“I didn’t dedicate this (production) to her, but it is kind of for her and her family because it makes fun of all those songs from all those musicals.”

Beyond the quips and in-jokes, the musical has a message to impart.

The cliques are the first casualty when the kids turn monster, and that’s how Fogell would like to see high school life: fewer barriers, more openness.

“I guess you could say that that’s the moral, if there is one,” he said. “Once they become monsters, they all start getting along, because they realize they are on the same level.”

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BPA’s 5th-12th grade Theatre School production class presents “I Was a Teenage Vampire,” 7:30 p.m. April 1-2 and 3 p.m. April 3 at the Playhouse. Tickets are $9 for students and seniors, $12 for adults, available at the Playhouse box office. Information: 842-8569 or www.theplayhouse.org.

On March 31, the 1st-4th grade production class presents an end-of-class performance of “Dr. Doolittle,” 5 p.m. March 3. Admission is free; donations to BPA’s scholarship fund welcome.