It's that time of year again for...
Thrillpeddler's Shocktoberfest Events!!
Starting this week with...
A Musical Seance with Jill Tracy and Paul Mercer
Channeling spirits, science, and seduction...
October 9, 10, 11 at 8 PM
Thrillpeddlers’ Hypnodrome, 575 10th Street, San Francisco
Just awarded the prestigious Best of the Bay 2008, our favorite noir chanteuse Jill Tracy returns home to Thrillpeddlers Hypnodrome for her latest incantation - A Musical Seance, an intimate collaboration with Atlanta cult composer/violinist Paul Mercer, and featuring master percussionist Randy Odell. These three special nights, Oct 9, 10 and 11, officially launch Thrillpeddlers' Shocktoberfest 2008, Elemental Horror and are the only chance Bay Area audiences have to ring in the Halloween season with Miss Tracy, as she is venturing to New Orleans with The Malcontent Orchestra, performing for Anne Rice's official Halloween Masquerade Ball! Audience members are asked to bring small objects of special significance to them, such as a photo, talisman, jewelery or token.
Since joining forces on Halloween 2007, Jill Tracy and Paul Mercer are becoming widely known for their astonishing duets on piano and violin, mostly improvised or channeled. The pair affectionately refer to their duets as spontaneous musical combustion. Their uncanny ability to conjure spirits through unsettlingly lavish compositions has led to spellbinding results, eerily transporting the room and its rapt audience into a musical seance. Legendary scribe V. Vale of RE/Search publications described a Jill Tracy/Paul Mercer seance as "Sheer magic! Perfection. Improvised... If you're lucky enough to be there, you realize you've just had a hint of something extra-mortal, uber-human, transcendent - maybe the concentrated ghosts of Shakespeare's Globe Theater or the Commedia Dell'arte of the past are swirling around the room . . . and you think that THIS is the new avant-garde: live, un-censored, living theater." Thrillpeddlers open the evening's bill with Rob Keefe's electrifying grand guignol comedy "A Slight Tingling!"
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and then...
Shocktoberfest!! 2008: Elemental Horror
Ice, Fire and Electro-magnetism
(plus plenty of blood!)
Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 PM
October 16 - November 22
Thrillpeddlers’ Hypnodrome, 575 10th Street, San Francisco
Thrillpeddlers, the world's leading purveyor of Grand Guignol terror theatre return to San Francisco for the company’s ninth annual Shocktoberfest!! a roller coaster of one-act plays that pitilessly pit our players against the extreme elements of ice, fire and electro-magnetism – and each other.
The theatrical genre of Grand Guignol, famous for it’s shockingly naturalistic approach to gore and taboo subject matter, originated at Le Theatre du Grand Guignol at the turn of the Twentieth Century and quickly gained international notoriety for it's flare for offering sensational theatrical fare, alternating steamy sex farces with bone-chilling terror plays – the unmatchable thrill of the “hot and cold shower” theatrical experience. This too is Thrillpeddlers' passion!
It’s “Men against the wilderness!” (and it looks like the wilderness is winning) in the premiere production of "A Difficult Passage" by Rob Keefe. A privileged pair of Yale grads, Bush and Prescott, strike out to face the icy perils of the Klondike en route to their fathers’ silver mines with an unwilling “whore” in tow. They’ve fallen in a hole, devoured their sled dogs, and with few resources are now forced to brave sub-zero elements and the questionable machinations of the Canadian Mountie they hope will rescue them. Thrillpeddlers director Russell Blackwood also helms the long awaited revival of Keefe's "A Slight Tingling," an outrageous electro-magnetic comedy (suggested by the 1907 Grand Guignol play Les Operations du professor Verdier) that skewers the hubris of surgeons and scientists alike.
Beijing is burning and “yellow-faced” rebels are poised to storm the French Embassy in Jonathan Horton’s “The Kindest Thing,” a new adaptation of the 1904 Grand Guignol classic La Derniere Torture. In a premise plucked from the headlines, the final moments of China’s anti-imperialist upraising known as the Boxer Rebellion are played out on the Hypnodrome stage in graphic detail and heartrending pathos. Thrillpeddlers’ signature “lights out” spookshow finale, also created by Horton, will bring goose bumps to a head in Shocktoberfest!! 2008’s hair-raising climax.
Pairs of patrons will surely enjoy Hypnodrome’s Shock Box seats for two, which garnered SF Weekly’s “Best of San Francisco 2008” for “Best Bonus Theater Experience.” These themed seats include sumptuous Turkish Lounges, as well as private boxes including “Heaven and Hell, ”The Pharaoh’s Tomb,” and “Padded Cell,” which offer the same opportunity for illicit trysting that was once a feature of the Parisian Théâtre du Grand Guignol—with added special effects as a nod to the 1950’s horror movie gimmicks of William Castle.
We happily extended the offer of discounted general admission tickets for just $15 every Thursday night. Come Fridays and Saturdays, the "Blue Hour" is back and audience members are invited stay for this after-glow floor show of fetish and variety acts well into the dark of night!
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