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In "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."
The black comedies bookend the evening's dramatic centerpiece, "The Drug," a 1930 thriller set in the opium dens of Saigon. San Francisco's resident Czar of Noir, Eddie Muller, penned the adaptation. "Rene Breton's original two-act play is a compact noir mystery," Muller says. "It's sexy and seductive, but builds inexorably to a very Grand Guignol climax." Hinting at how horrible that climax might be, Muller notes that Jonathan Horton, who created Jeff Goldblum's makeup for The Fly, designed the prosthetic effects used in "The Drug".
Things get more contemporary starting Saturday, July 2, when Mel Gordon, America's foremost expert on the history of Grand Guignol theatre, debuts his original play "Abu Ghraib," Gordon stokes the scenario's "for us or against us" rhetoric to the ultimate Grand Guignol outrage.
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