Z-Town: The Zombie Musical tries to make eating people funny
Colm McCarthy
Welcome to Cheap Seats, where every Thursday we’ll talk to folks behind the scenes of the stage events opening around town in order to give you a flavor of the productions that won’t be found in any of the promo materials.
Z-Town: The Zombie Musical, Bartell Theatre, Sept. 29-Oct. 15
Promo pull quote: “When one high-minded zombie invites an unsuspecting family of tasty Breathers to town, will the undead find the rest they’ve been denied? Or have these zombies bitten off more than they can chew?”
What it’s really about: Madison Performance Collective and Out!Cast Theatre’s brand-new Z-Town: The Zombie Musical is centered on a family of regular folks who venture into a government-sanctioned zombie internment city and find out that zombies really will eat you. Or at least try to. “Inviting humans to live with zombies is not a good idea. That’s probably the easiest way to encapsulate the overall path of the story,” says director Pete Rydberg. “The best intentions fall apart when we try to live in harmony with those we eat.” But Z-Town isn’t all run-and-shoot zombie entertainment though: It’s a musical featuring 15 songs, with the attendant gore and eating of people. “It’s musical theater. It’s fun, it’s bright, it’s campy. We try to make eating people funny,” Rydberg says.
Fun fact: If you’ve read an Entertainment Weekly or any similar publication over the past, say, two years, you know that zombie popular culture is totally “in” right now. The people on the production team of Z-Town realize this, and they’re not pretending their play exists in a vacuum. They’ve even planted some Easter eggs for diehard zombie fans. “We acknowledge the fact that we come out of a very big tradition of zombie cult movies and zombie culture, so one of the things that my makeup team has done is they’ve taken visual icons from zombie movies, like Dawn Of The Dead and a myriad of others, and, in a sort of Where’s Waldo? style, inserted them visually into the scenes,” Rydberg says. “So in that way, there’s a shout-out to the ‘real’ zombie people out in the crowd.”
Why you should try it: Because it’s an all-original production, and it’s damn ambitious: Launching a musical based on an entirely original zombie universe isn’t exactly like staging Romeo And Juliet after all. “This production is sort of out of nowhere. The musician [Meghan Rose] and the playwright [Sarah Mucek] have never done anything like this before; they just had a good idea and a lot of gumption. And they sort of whipped this thing together,” Rydberg says. The original version of Z-Town was three hours long, but after some workshopping, and some dramatic reassembling of the play’s parts, it’s down to two hours with an intermission. “We’ve literally stitched this play back together into a new form—30 pages shorter and fewer scenes and musical numbers—to make it fast and exciting theater,” Rydberg says. And you should go because, you know, zombies.
