SILENCE! The Musical
When: To Aug. 3
Where: BMO Theatre Centre
Tickets: $42/$37 at artsclub.com
A comic musical about psychopathic murderers might not be everyone’s cup of blood. SILENCE! The Musical is definitely not your Sound of Music or even Little Shop of Horrors.
Advertised as “the unauthorized parody” of The Silence of the Lambs, SILENCE! makes its Vancouver debut nearly three decades after the 1991 Best Picture insinuated itself into our brains with chilling images of Anthony Hopkins as cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter, steel grid across his teeth.
A spoof this far removed from the original movie might not have the bite it once did, but Down Stage Right Productions, the Neanderthal Arts Festival and director Mark Carter have put together a pretty slick production of a show whose New York Fringe origins are never far from sight.
Clever, outrageous and slightly shocking at its best, at worst SILENCE! feels like skit night at a high school that allows everyone to use very bad words.
Stephanie Liatopoulous stars as Clarice Starling and Seth Gordon Little as Hannibal Lecter in SILENCE! The Musical, which runs through Aug. 3 at the BMO Theatre Centre. Photo: Derek Fu
Derek Fu /
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Stephanie Liatopoulos plays Jodie Foster’s role, young FBI agent Clarice Starling, charged with getting help from monstrously clever imprisoned psychiatrist Lecter (Seth Gordon Little) to catch a psycho called Buffalo Bill (Mike Kovac), who has kidnapped a senator’s daughter (Steffanie Davis). Bill kills and skins his female victims.
In exchange for his help, Lecter gets Clarice to tell him of her nightmares about her dead cop father (Scott Walters) and a herd of slaughtered lambs. Derry Oshust, Jenn Suratos and Graeme Thompson, plus the other actors when not in character, play an incongruous chorus of singing, dancing lambs with little hoof arms courtesy of costumer Julie White.
The show’s best songs have language I’m unable even to paraphrase in this newspaper. But a few of the self-consciously witty lyrics and rhymes are quotable. “I’m sick, I need an audience for my shtick,” Hannibal sings. Clarice’s father’s ghost serenades her: “I hope you enjoy this painful flashback.”
Stephanie Liatopoulous stars as Clarice Starling and Seth Gordon Little as Hannibal Lecter in SILENCE! The Musical, which runs through Aug. 3 at the BMO Theatre Centre. Photo: Derek Fu
Derek Fu /
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Relatively normal Clarice basically acts as straight-woman for the sickos, who have the best and grossest roles. As Hannibal the Cannibal, Little is deadpan funny, especially when singing beautifully, as if it were a stirring ballad in Les Mis, about how he’d like to smell … Oh, never mind.
Kovac goes full tilt as trans wacko Buffalo Bill. Usually in the program as a fight director, he has an edgy comic gift and is a surprisingly good singer. The finest voice in the show belongs to Davis, who plays both the senator and her kidnapped daughter Catherine. Her duet with Kovac is a highlight.
Ken Overbey provides simple, jazzy choreography and production designer Darren W. Hales effectively uses lighting along with a few set pieces to establish the multiple locations. Musical director Jeremy Hoffman gets amazingly full sound from a mini-orchestra of musicians Jancis Bautista, Tyler Murray and himself.
More evidence of the abundance of musical theatre talent in Vancouver, this production almost manages to make a silk purse out of a lamb’s ear. It definitely made me want to see the movie again.
