EntertainmentJUN 27, 2018

Shock Opera! A Play With An All-Woman Cast About The Band That Invented The Rock Show- Alice Cooper!

The thought occurred to me over and over through the decades ever since the 1980's and didn't hatch until less than three years ago; "Why hasn't anyone made a stage play about the most theatrical and arguably the best band to come out of the 70's, Alice Cooper?"

The name conjures images of dark rock spectacles filled with gore, epic costumes, broadway style dance numbers, and monsters. Rock shows that were equal parts Salvador Dali, vaudeville, and Vincent Price with a variety of music styles that still hold up. Even my grandmother liked "Only Women Bleed." Their influence in popular culture is still heard, seen, and felt everywhere you look...if you know the history.

Alice Cooper had been school-yard lore for years in the 1970's and 80's. I knew very little facts by the time the band broke up in 1974, other than the occasional song played on the radio, the fact that they dressed in glittery women's clothing, something involving a chicken, hearsay, and the iconic image of the spiked-raccoon eyes. Eventually I saw his "Welcome to My Nightmare" T.V. Special and his appearance on The Muppet Show a few years later, but at that point in time I was still more of a fan of his friends, The Beatles. The memetic-earwig hadn't laid those nasty eggs in my brain, yet.

In 1983, a friend in 8th grade who took me as a "Halloween person," and loaned me a cassette of "Welcome to My Nightmare." It changed my brain permanently and launched me on an obsessive quest for every album they ever recorded to date.

I never joined a rock band. I just acted in plays and directed short movies in my backyard that no one saw as we moved from county to county. I was a state park ranger's son.

Between 1983 to 1988, I had also collected every known recorded Alice Cooper album and bootleg except the elusive first two on Zappa's Bizarre Label. By 1986, Alice's solo act returned after his rehab and years of healing. Around 1989 or so, I wrote a letter to Alice asking if there was any way that the first album, "Pretties for You" and the second, "Easy Action," could be re-released as I couldn't find them anywhere. Coincidentally, they came out the next month. In the time just before the explosion of the internet, I had every Alice Cooper related recording that I had any knowledge about. It seemed like someone should turn these ideas into a movie or something. But I didn't have the tools. I knew about as much about live story-telling at age 18 as the young Coopers knew about rock music when they were 18.

The idea for an Alice Cooper play or movie or something persisted in my memories. The music was so disgustingly great.

I majored in English Literature at Chico State with the intent to be a novelist and screenwriter. I also took three theater courses. My directing professor, Donna Breed, once told us to write and direct more roles for women in the future. There weren't enough, apparently. But then, it also seemed like the plays the local theaters were doing at the time was Shakespeare, Neal Simon, and David Mamet.

Yeah, I could do with less of those guys and more of something different.

My focus after college turned to rock promotion and theatre. By day, I worked as a store artist and clerk at Tower Books in downtown Chico, CA in the early 90's and found myself illustrating rock posters at clubs like Juanita's. Around the same time, a new theater called The Cosmic Travel Agency was opening, founded by a few of my fellow English majors from Chico State University; storytellers who wanted to make epic shows without the institutional creative-blocks or over-adherence to "The Canon." They encouraged studying the history of stage, especially obscure, century-old European theater all but forgotten after the world wars, technical innovation, low-rent spectacle, genuine humor, and creating original works. Before long I was promoting theatre as well as acting, programming, writing, and directing.

I collaborated with many talented people for six years at this theater space, sometime with original rock musicals, and eventually moved to Portland in 1999.

This continued, although not as intensely, into the new century. When I temporarily lost my inspiration with theatre, I founded an annual 72-hour horror movie contest called GuignolFest the year Obama was elected.

Between 2010 and 2012, I was the Talent Liaison, House Director, and House M.C. at the Bossanova Ballroom and the last play I directed there was an all-woman version of the Quentin Tarantino classic called, "Reservoir Dolls" written by Erika Anne Soerensen. Berlin Sorfa (Alice Cooper 2018) was cast as the ill-fated "Ms. Blue" and she has been part of our team ever since.

My wife Julia Reodica and I met after I left the Bossanova at the Fright Town haunted house attraction in October of 2013. Julia is a doctor of nursing practice and an accomplished artist of many disciplines. We went to an Alice Cooper show in Portland and she asked me, "What do you want to do?"

"Write and direct a play about Alice Cooper," I said.

So, we bought all the books we could find and watched every interview my eyes and ears could absorb. I wrote a play in the middle of many nights and Julia's management made it a reality. We had actors in mind who were regular participants of GuignolFest such as Una Solitaire (Glen Buxton), Jeannette Trexler (Dennis Dunaway), and Berlin Sorfa (previously Neal Smith). I started auditions before the script was complete and on the day I cast the show, the original Alice Cooper band announced they were reuniting for an album and a U.K. tour. The coincidences were getting weirder.

It was the women actors who shined through auditions as the leads to play the men of the Alice Cooper band. The first Alice Cooper on-stage was male, but the future Alice roles are women. As rehearsals progressed, it would be the women cast and crew who offered a feminist lens to interpret the male-dominated world of rock and roll, and the Alice Cooper story. The women actors also mirror the Alice Cooper Group as the GTO's (Girls Together Outrageously), a band who was a driving force behind the androgynous look of Alice Cooper. The relationship between actors, crew, and the director was a collaborative one.

Berlin Sorfa, as Alice Cooper this year, leads the band from its infancy in high school to their rock and roll fantasy. Jeannette Trexler, as Dennis Dunaway, is the play's story-teller and Alice's best friend. Una Solitaire, as Glen Buxton, is the rebellious passion of the band. Later on, I recruited Bethany Ziskind Hankins for the roles of Michael Bruce, who wrote many of the band's hits and Sheryl Cooper. We met her during the re-boot of Reservoir Dolls in 2017, as Jo Cabot, the salty and tough talking gangster. Evelyn Cushing, who joined the group this year, easily fit the roles for Neal Smith, the heart and emotion behind the band, and Ms. Sloan. Rocket and Una, who perform burlesque numbers for the show, are the feminine mirror to Alice Cooper's obsessions with horror and shock theatre.

West Ramsey (Shep Gordon), wrangles the band as they all careened into fame and struggle along with Dylan Hillerman as Joe Greenberg. Jacci (Frank Zappa, Alice Cooper Hall of Fame) put a spin on the rock icons that will leave you laughing or crying. Angus Vieira (Grouch Marx) shows a special friendship only Groucho and Alice could have. Julia Reodica (Nurse Rozetta) embodies the addiction Alice must face alone. As friends with some of the actors for years now, there was a great amount of trust to support our intense working relationship. This bond is what makes the current cast and crew iron-clad.

Next, rehearsals and workshopping. This included running scenes we never used and including short movies that were to be projected on-screen between certain live segments. For the first stage run, we recorded four Alice Cooper songs in a 17-hour session at Jackpot Studios so I could sing live with backup music that sounded far superior to your average karaoke cover. Look for 2 more songs this year.

The show had its problems and setbacks but we kept rocking and rolling and prevented the van from crashing. In that first run, an actor had to drop days before the show which meant we changed the script. We were exhausted from re-writing and re-rehearsing new passages to fix plot holes. We finally performed our first four shows at The Funhouse Lounge in Portland, OR (2016), and all of the original actresses have come back each year.

A few months later, we remounted the play on the night of our 8th annual GuignolFest kickoff. At intermission, someone told me that Alice Cooper's personal assistant, Kyler Clark, was in our audience.

The next day we met Alice Cooper himself, thanks to Kyler. I was dressed as him, in a red brocade lounge jacket, leather pants, black wig, and spiked eye makeup. He loved my jacket having bought a similar one for himself. We gave him gifts from the show including women's undies with the Shock Opera logo and spiked eyes illustration on it. He told us to "Keep doing what we are doing," with his disarmingly nice smile so opposed from the rock-and-roll villain's sneer he has portrayed on stage since the late 60's. Kyler had taken photos of Shock Opera when he saw it, and had to show Alice right away. They both discussed with us how impressed they were with our story and visual details. Alice suggested that we keep evolving the play and that he wanted to stay updated. As Kyler photographed our meeting with Alice, he was grinning ear to ear and kept saying to all of us, "It's getting pretty weird, huh?" Oh yeah, Kyler... it can't get any weirder than this.

We floated out.

Last year, we produced Shock Opera, returning to The Paris Theatre in Portland and The Columbia Theater in Seattle, WA. The show was garnering more fans in the Northwest and we were surprised at the feedback to run the show the following year.

Julia and I took a break to travel. We found out that the original members of the Alice Cooper Group would perform for the first time in 48 years. We had to get to Birmingham, UK to see it with our own eyes.

The night before the concert, the original bassist, Dennis Dunaway, was having a book signing at Swordfish Records in Birmingham. Upon walking up to his table, we greeted the fellow Oregonian and we all couldn't believe that we finally met. He and his wife, Cindy, had been watching our Shock Opera play progress on social media, and he congratulated us. Cindy also spoke to us about the her influence upon the Alice Cooper costumes and encouraged us to do more with ours. The look of glam and glitter rock all started from Cindy. People in line to get autographs from Dennis then recognized who we were and yelled, "Hey, it's the Shock Opera people!" We felt like rock stars, next to legends, Dennis and Cindy.

We floated out... again.

This year, we are back at it, but this time for two nights at The Paris Theatre!

If there was no Alice Cooper band, there would be no Rocky Horror Show, no Hedwig, no Phantom of the Paradise, no Glitter Rock, Glam, Punk, Metal, blahblahblah

This show makes that argument. You be the judge.

Come on up and see us sometime!

Don't miss it!

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