Severed limbs all over my kitchen…

It’s only been two weeks since Devious Theatre’s highly successful return to the stage with Heart Shaped Vinyl. The dust hadn’t even began to settle when we were already in rehearsals for our upcoming production Cannibal the musical.
For anybody who has seen the film then you’ll know this isn’t your standard run of the mill musical. For anybody who hasn’t seen it then “this isn’t your standard run of the mill musical!”
Written by South Park creator Trey Parker, Cannibal tells the story of Alfred Packer, a mining prospector who tries to lead a small party of miners through the Rocky Mountains to Colorado territory. Sounds pretty boring, like your normal run of the mill musical, but then again Trey Parker doesn’t do boring, and neither do Devious Theatre. The miners get lost, Packers horse/love interest is stolen, and one by one people start eating each other, until Packer is the only one left. Throw in hilarious songs about building snowmen, hanging bastards, shpadoinkle days, add a Cyclops, a bunch of whores, a nasty bunch of animal trappers and you get something that’s really gonna raise some eyebrows in this town.
This is also the first time Cannibal the musical has been performed in Ireland and all of us at Devious Theatre thought long and hard about how we could really catch the attention of not only the people and media of Kilkenny but take it to a bigger, nationwide media aswell.
Rehearsals are in full swing, in the next few weeks we’ll start releasing the teaser posters and promo shots, the design for the poster is going to be brilliant, I’m not letting it slip yet but it will once again be expertly designed by Mr Paddy Dunne who designed the amazing series of posters for Heart Shaped Vinyl. Which, I must point out are now framed and hanging on the wall in Cleeres pub. You can also read daily blog posts on the Devious Theatre website to follow the progress in rehearsals and behind the scenes.
But none of this seemed to be enough for us Devious bunch to catch the attention of the big media. So we asked ourselves; “how do we, a bunch of unknowns, get attention from the likes of Hot Press magazine, TV3 news and the Irish Theatre magazine etc?”, “how do we catch their attention and get them to cover the show?” , “ how do we do this the Devious Theatre way and keep in the tone of the show?”
And then we had it, how do we catch somebodies attention and make them want to see this show, want to promote it and remember the name Devious Theatre? We send them a SEVERED HAND in the post!
So myself, Niamh Moroney, Kevin Mooney and Dave Thompson had a little devious get-together yesterday in my kitchen to begin work on the severed limbs. The first one was a disaster, the latex did nothing much but stick to every hair on my arm and hang on for dear life when I tried to remove it. Even Vaseline couldn’t ease the removal of the fishy smelling material as it pulled my arm hair out. So instead we tried some plaster -paris, a little easier on the arm hair, but not by much.
The plan is to then paint the hands before covering them in latex to give a skin like texture, add some fake nails, a little bit of hair, some fake blood, a couple of bite marks and then neatly place them in a box clutching the contents of the Cannibal press packs.
I only wish I could see the faces of our media hit list as they open the package to find a severed hand clutching information about Cannibal the musical, Devious Theatre and a few extra promotional goodies.
I really think this will make it quite irresistible for them to ignore both the show itself and the devious bunch behind it. I also hope that our promotional gesture is taken well, that nobody has a heart attack or that we don’t end up performing Cannibal the musical behind some prison walls. Of course all of these outcomes would result in mass media coverage, but not the type we intended unfortunately.
So over the next few weeks I’ll be keeping you posted on our progress with the show, making the fake limbs and the press packs. And I’ll let you know if we get any responses or restraining orders once they get sent out aswell.