Randy Gibson

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Vertigo Theatre

At this moment, out of costume, Tyler Rive looks more likely to pelvic thrust through the chorus of “Greased Lightning” than to take on an army of the dead. Dressed in an anonymous white t-shirt and jeans, his hair is a little too slicked back, and his chin doesn’t quite look big enough to carry badass one-liners. More disconcertingly, perhaps, he sings — a lot. This is the man stepping into the role of nerd-beloved Ashley “Ash” J. Williams of the Evil Dead trilogy in Ground Zero Theatre’s and Hit & Myth Productions’ Evil Dead: The Musical. Maybe there’s no room for bad-assery when you’re singing and dancing.

But when Rive is onstage, cutting off his possessed hand with a chainsaw in that infamous scene that put Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi into the nerd cult pantheon, all doubt disappears. Rive is Ash in all his badass glory. This is someone who gets it.

“Ash, to me, is an Everyman anti-hero,” Rive says of his character. “He encounters Deadites and horrible stuff happens to him, but he never actually panics.”

Rive, playing Ash for the first time in Calgary, hasn’t seen any of the effects yet. He’s only heard the rumours and noticed that manic spark people get in their eyes when they talk about the blood and gore. Evil Dead: The Musical will offer a splatter zone, where the audience in the first three rows pay a higher price to get splattered and sprayed with blood. Rive, however, isn’t as enthusiastic as these fans. After all, he’s the one getting drenched in the stuff night after night. Audience members in the zone will get ponchos. Rive gets nothing.

“I’m trying to spray myself in the face with a variety of things,” says Rive about his preparations. “There’s been talk of cryo-jets and spray. The special effects will be wild.”

Rive wants to make sure he gets it right. After all, people have astronomical expectations that must be met. Even beyond the hallowed reputation of the original Evil Dead trilogy, the musical (the brainchild of Toronto comedians George Reinblatt, Christopher Bond, Frank Cipolla and Melissa Morris) has left a wake of orgasmic fans writhing for the next remount, from its off-Broadway run in New York to the production in Seoul, Korea, and now, Calgary. The musical mashes up plot elements from the first two Evil Dead movies, and lifts dialogue from the trilogy, including the final installation: Army of Darkness. This time, though, the decapitations, possessions and tree rapes happen during campy musical numbers with songs like “What the Fuck Was That?” and “All the Men in My Life Keep Getting Killed by Canadians.”

“I have been watching the movies a lot,” says Rive. “I’m watching what Bruce Campbell is doing with his eyes, the specific looks he’s hitting and how he phrases certain iconic lines. The whole ‘This is my boomstick’ bit has a certain rhythm to it. If I go out there and do that monologue and it’s completely different than the movies, people are going to be pissed. [The movies] have such a huge cult following and you have to appease what the audience has come to see. It’s a fine line between giving people what they want and trying to make it your own as much as possible.”

The actor admits he came to the movies later in life, when they weren’t so forbidden. He didn’t discover the films at the back of a laundromat/Chinese food buffet/video store, or smuggle a VHS copy of Evil Dead II into a sleepover hidden in a Care Bear movie slipcase. He isn’t a self-professed deadite — those diehard fans named after the demons in the films. Though Rive says Army of Darkness is his favourite of the trilogy, he isn’t quite sure why the musical and the films have attracted such large followings.

“This has been a topic of conversation a lot in the last couple weeks,” he says. “I’m not quite sure why this is such a huge deal for so many people…. Is it the B-movie quality of it that people appreciate? It’s a bit of a mystery to me.”

Becky Scott has been wondering the same thing. She’s the co-founder of Bleeding Arts, the local special effects company working on everything from pneumatic blood systems to prosthetic limbs and heads for the show. Though not a Deadite herself, the company’s work for horror films, such as the Ginger Snaps sequels, has given her an inkling of why people are so excited about the musical.

“I think it’s just fun and cheesy,” says Scott. “It’s a release for people and they need that, especially nowadays. I do think part of it is that people recognize the name and want to find out what the buzz is about, but I think movies like Evil Dead have that weird kind of edginess that attracts people.”

And a large part of that edginess is the musical’s tenacious adherence to the spirit of Raimi’s original vision: blood and gore. An obscene amount of blood and gore. Though this production is using the original sets from the Toronto run, Bleeding Arts has been working on amping up the effects, while staying true to the shoe-string budget esthetics of the films.

“You’ll still get the cheese values you’d expect from Evil Dead, we’re just upping the level of quality,” ensures Scott. “This is not Joe Schmoe Halloween kind of stuff. Ground Zero and Hit & Myth have really put their money where their mouth is. All this stuff is like magic, that’s what we’re trying to create.”

The company is still figuring out how many gallons of blood will be required each night. Scott, however, promises a blood bath.

But that’s what it takes to be Ash: a willingness to be abused. Rive is not only willing to get splattered with blood and guts, but also dragged around the set, throttled by his own hand, to chainsaw the living dead and reload a shotgun with one hand. Without a doubt, Rive captures Ash in all of his Bruce Campbell glory.