wiredfool

Three years, three deaths. Two rebirths so far. We’ll see about the third next May.

Three Webleys came into the theater last night, the very dead original, the somewhat dead last years model, and the now dead current Jason. They performed a shadow box greek chorus recapping the storyline so far and forshadowing the evenings plot. Then the real Jason started singing. Crouched over and on his toes, he started singing an a capella version of Angel Band. (An old gospel song that you might have heard on the O Brother soundtrack.) I shivered as I recognized it. I’m not quite used to Jason singing from that tradition.

Then one of the other Jasons put a shovel and drum stick in his hands, started singing “The Graveyard” and it was back to the normal Halloween antics. The first fake Jason then took the shovel, strapped on the accordion, and we got renditions of 2am and Halloween. It sounded like a Klezmer band gone horribly wrong. But the crowd loved it.

The evening continued with many of the standard Holloween show favorites: Dancing while the sky crashed down, Pseudo Drunken Drinking Song, a story leading up to Thriller, and many of the sad songs of leaving this world.

And of course, there was the ritual death, this time performed in shadow on stage. It felt more stylistic and theatrical than the unknown ambigous endings of the last few years. He was stripped to a loincloth before the knife came down and blood thrown on the screen. He was then hoisted up in a crucifix pose, lowered into the center of the crowd, tied to a rail, and carried a mile though a park to a tree.

It’s at this point that the performance paled in comparison to the previous years. Perhaps it was the weather, the earlier images in the theater, or the police wondering what 150 people were doing in Ravenna park at midnight. It appeared that he was cocooned up and tied to a tree, but the significance wasn’t clear.

If he comes back, there will be a May day show.