Photo Flash: Buck Creek Players Present Frankenstein: A New Musical

The Buck Creek Players will continue their 2010-2011 season "From Page to Stage" with the Indianapolis Premiere of Frankenstein: A New Musical. Opening Friday, June 3, and running for three weekends through Sunday, June 19, curtain times will be at 8:00 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, with 2:30 p.m. matinees offered on Sunday. All performances will be held at the Buck Creek Playhouse on Indianapolis' southeast side at 11150 Southeastern Avenue. Tickets are $16 for adults and $14 for students and senior citizens (ages 62 & older) and can be reserved by calling (317) 862-2270. Group discounts are also available for parties of ten or more.

In this stage adaptation of Frankenstein, authors Mark Baron (music), Jeffrey Jackson (book and lyrics), and Gary P. Cohen (original story adaptation) have sought to create a work that was uniquely faithful to Mary Shelley's original novel while offering a bold, new experience for modern theater audiences. To do so, they have broken with many of the conventions of musical theater to re-imagine the classic allegory as a "memory play" in which time and space are fluid, and in which people and places come instantly alive in the mind of the story's protagonist, Victor Frankenstein--and vanish just as quickly. The result is a thrilling "mindscape" that brings the timeless myth of Frankenstein to life as never before.

1793. North of the Arctic Circle, a sailing vessel comes upon a man adrift on a floe of ice near death. His name is Victor Frankenstein (Daniel Robert), and he proceeds to tell the ship's captain, Robert Walton (Michael R. Dodds), the horrifying tale of his twisted life.

Victor is the scion of a prominent family of Geneva, Switzerland, where he enjoyed a childhood of wealth and privilege. As a young boy, he exhibits a brilliant mind and a gift for the natural sciences, and his parents, Alphonse (Steve Hermanson) and Caroline (Paige Scott), dote on him adoringly. Their family soon swells to include Elizabeth (Kelly Najacht)--an orphaned waif whom Victor's parents adopt as their ward--and later, William (Noah McCullough), Victor's much-younger brother. Victor's brother in spirit is Henry Clerval (Brandon Alstott), his childhood friend, and he, Victor, and Elizabeth forge deep bonds of friendship from their earliest days.