'Night of the Living Opera' banner
A year ago, on the eve of a trial run for Night of the Living Opera, Milwaukee Opera Theatre’s Jill Anna Ponasik told me, “I don’t like horror movies!” Then why mount an ambitious production based on George Romero’s 1968 cult classic, Night of the Living Dead?
The immediate answer was that she enjoyed working with her collaborators. Night of the Living Opera began several years BC (Before Covid) as a Halloween puppet show by the Angry Young Men troupe. Angry Young puppeteer Josh Perkins married Milwaukee Opera Theatre (MOT) singer Julianne Perkins and co-recreated the show as an opera with original music by composer Andrew Dewey. The project circled back to MOT, puppets intact but augmented by actors and musicians.
However, Ponasik eventually found deeper resonance with the zombie saga that inspired her collaborators. “Nuclear war paranoia and nervousness over social change undergirds the film but watching it while the pandemic was still unfolding—the characters glued to the radio as I was in real life in 2020, listening for any news about the virus …” Romero’s apocalypse clicked.
The pandemic dogged last fall’s reading of Night of the Living Opera like a stray zombie that got into the house through an open window. The morning after the first rehearsal, one cast member was diagnosed with Covid. MOT was left with four days to rehearse. “If the rest of us were going to test positive, it would’ve been on opening night,” Ponasik recalls. The once-infected actor returned for the opener wearing a mask. “Psychologically, it was a disaster, but we did all the shows, it went incredibly well land we received the useful feedback we were looking for” in preparation for the 2023 roll-out.
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Spooky, Eerie, Funny
This year’s Night of the Living Opera will be a full production with expanded cast and a pocket-size orchestra. If you were present at one of the 2022 readings, the new production “will sound familiar, but will be a vastly different experience,” Ponasik says. “The way Dewey writes music is so colorful! We did the best we could last year with only piano and bass, but with the orchestra and the electronics, the music becomes spooky, eerie, paranoid and tense—a much wider color palette that will be part of the excitement.”
The rampaging zombies will be represented by human-size puppets (manipulated by a team of four puppeteers) with minor characters depicted on screens by shadow puppets. The live actors will interact with the shadows, sing to the puppets, in a production whose low-tech aesthetic relies on creativity and imagination, not infrastructure. Red fabric will stand for blood, rolls and rolls of it as the bloodshed continues.
In Night of the Living Opera, situational humor converges with tragedy. “We want both to be present,” Ponasik insists. “The moments of operatic catharsis—a gorgeous duet before the blow up! There are moments that are so funny, if you took any of that away, it would be a real loss.”
Horrific and humorous, with figurative gore instead of buckets of fake blood, Night of the Living Opera is entertaining and thought provoking, not unlike the way Romero’s film has been received. Ponasik wants “people to experience a sense of community—to not feel like the anonymous person who purchased a ticket to seat G7. That sense of community, people feeling part of a special event, that’s what my goal is.”
Milwaukee Opera Theatre will perform Night of the Living Opera Oct. 27-Nov. 5 at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre, 158 N. Broadway. For tickets and more information, visit https://www.milwaukeeoperatheatre.org/.
