‘Re-Animator’ makes a splash, but volume needs to be brought to life

By John Katsilometes

Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2015 | 1:30 p.m.

The show that just opened at the Smith Center is where we watch Norm from “Cheers” spit blood into the audience.

But that is not the whole story, just the start, of “Re-Animator: The Musical” at Troesh Studio Theater. (Show times are 8 p.m., with 2:30 p.m. matinees added Jan. 10-11 and 17-18. Tickets start at $44 and are available by calling (702) 749-2000 and at the Smith Center website SmithCenter.com.)

The show’s chief selling points include the presence of a famous TV-sitcom star and something called a “Splash Zone.” George Wendt, famous from “Cheers” and in the “Superfans” skits from “Saturday Night Live” (“Da Bears!”), is at the top of the bill.

The avuncular stage and TV vet plays the role of Dean Halsey, who runs the Swiss university where the re-animation of dead bodies is being studied. The result is unfettered, funny and frequently moist. During the re-animation process, a great deal of fake blood, a brown liquor that looks like brandy and other fluids are spat and squirted into the crowd.

Not to worry. This is far less an element to the stage show than, say, Gallagher’s manic destruction of watermelons and other assorted fruit. Those seated close are provided plastic trash bags for protection, looking like a couple dozen condoms near the stage, and the liquids are said to be made of baby shampoo.

The flying fluids are only peripherally connected to the show’s plot, used as a mechanism to keep the audience’s attention in a show that runs 2 hours with a 20-minute intermission.

The musical, playing through Jan. 18, is an adaptation of the 1985 cult film “H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator.” The source material is originally Lovecraft’s 1922 short story “Herbert West — Reanimator.” The musical achieved the rare one of just a very few productions to earn seven five-star reviews in the United Kingdom.

The show was thus nominated for Best of Fest in the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. It has received six L.A. Weekly awards, including Musical of the Year in 2012.

Thus, it’s a time-tested piece of work, and Wendt is not the lone star in this ensemble cast. Often his Dean Halsey seems like the bassist in a great band, keeping the rhythm steady while the others performers swap solos. The 66-year-old alum of Second City comedy troupe in Chicago has referred to himself as “the geezer” in the show, and that quality suits the overmatched Dean Halsey ideally.

Though not known as a great vocalist, Wendt sings in the show, along with everyone in the cast, and the production’s opening show Tuesday suffered from poor audio quality. The performers are not using mics, so projection is crucial, and those voices and the accompanying tracks were often too faint to appreciate.

Sound cues were off at times, and when Herbert West (Graham Skipper) took a shovel to the head of Dr. Hill (Jesse Merlin), the cue was several seconds early. It reminded of the moment in “Absinthe” when an exasperated Gaz pulls the cork from a champagne bottle, and the “pop” is seconds too late. That’s an intended joke, but it seems accidental in “Re-Animator.”

The lead characters are medical student West, played with seedy delight by Skipper; his agreeable classmate Dan Cain (Darren Ritchie); and the Swiss Dr. Hill, the instructor at the school. The bespectacled West, dressed in a black suit with thin tie that seems left over from “The Book of Mormon,” is the creepy genius. He’s developed a serum, happily a day-glow green, which re-animates dead tissue.

The show plays out as a blend of the original “Frankenstein” saga, with some intensely comedic zombie action sprinkled throughout. Comparisons to the campy-dark “Little Shop of Horrors” are spot on. The score is by the original composer, Mark Nutter, and loaded with delicious lyrics.

Dr. Hill tells his gullible and uninspired students that he has developed a theory of brain regeneration, which is not true, and they respond with, “If he says he thought it up! Thought it up! That’s good enough for us!”

West moves in with Dan, asking in one of the show’s funniest moments, “Do you have a basement?” with no further explanation. This is where the re-animation experiments are to continue, and Dan’s cat is soon made the first test subject, dying “accidentally” after forcing its head inside a glass jar and brought back to life by the giddy West.

The cat is once more killed, by a baseball bat-wielding Dan, and again springs to life after a shot of the green stuff. “Was dead, but alive now!” he says. “So it doesn’t count!”

Dan happens to be shagging Megan Halsey (Jessica Howell), Dean Halsey’s daughter. Dan joins West in further advancing his serum, which will certainly change the face of modern medicine and turn West into a medical superstar. But Dr. Hill, who has a history of taking others’ ideas as his own, wants that credit (he also wants Megan, too, in one of the show’s creepy subplots).

And (alert to the spoiler here) West winds up knocking off Hill and lopping off his head, then bringing both pieces of his body back to life.

Dan and he also work through the morgue and resurrect corpses that have met all sorts of unfortunate fates: A Girl Scout mauled by a grizzly bear, a burn victim and a Polynesian showgirl with a ukulele crammed up her butt. They all sing of their respective plights, with intestines spraying the first two rows as if being peppered by a fire hose. The group dance number at the finale feels like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, with the undead grooving grossly to celebrate their re-animation.

By then, even Dean Halsey has been reanimated, his head wrapped in bloody gauze. He is a long way from that bar in Boston, and this shot of green stuff is far more potent than a mug of beer.

Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at Twitter.com/JohnnyKats. Also, follow “Kats With the Dish” at Twitter.com/KatsWiththeDish.