Before the latest installment of Shocktoberfest begins, Thrillpeddlers' Artistic Director Russell Blackwood takes the stage to give a brief background of Le Theatre du Grand-Guignol. The Paris company specialized in terror, especially the bloody sort, but an evening's program might also include comedy, drama, and music. In other words, a little bit of this and a little bit of that, heavy on the ketchup. That's a pretty good summary of the 16th Shocktoberfest production, subtitled Curse of the Cobra .
The new show gets off to a deceptively straightforward start with a short play set on the grubby fringes of the Gold Rush. Andy Wenger and Damien Chacona's Cracking the Vein is a tale of greed and backstabbing, and while no one is actually stabbed in the back, there is a high body count at the finish as three miners (Wenger, Chacona, and the comically bountiful John Flaw) and three prostitutes (Bruna Palmiero, Dee Nathaniel, and Katrina Kroetch) battle over an unexpected bounty. Directed by Blackwood, it's an entertaining piece but much in need of a snappier ending.
The second new play in the production can hardly be called straightforward. Rob Keefe's The Model House deals in domestic abuse, incest, patricide, castration, autoerotic asphyxiation, and a crabby neighbor. David Bicha struts around his split-level domain as a post-war Marine staking his claim on the American dream, with problems arising when not everyone agrees on what that dream should look like. The kids, of course, are the biggest burr in his suburban saddle.
The carrot-topped twins aren't growing up according to plan, with sullen Heidi becoming increasingly resistant to being daddy's little girl and sissyish Rusty showing few signs of being a chip off the old block. Owen Asdell creates a boyish, sexually charged Rusty, while Birdie-Bob Watt gives Heidi his comically keen world-weary treatment. Noah Haydon plays their perfectly coiffed mother, and director Blackwood sharply marshals a huge cast as themes, tones, and plotlines go bouncing off the walls.
But if you really want off-the-wall adventures, wait until the final piece of the production. Scrumbly Koldewyn seems to be channeling his days with the Cockettes in The Revenge of the Son of the Cobra Woman, a musical that takes druggie stream-of-consciousness detours with what starts out to be a story of a man and his dog. Chacona plays a lonely guy who buys a pup-boy (which is not the same thing as a boy puppy) from a vending machine, but their bestial bromance is interrupted when the pup is kidnapped and pirated off to Cobra Island, where the cobra people have enslaved a colony of lupine creatures.
Koldewyn has provided an eclectic selection of songs to spice the story, from a pop-ditty about puppy love to the kind of faux-jungle chants found in a Maria Montez movie. Earl Alfred Paus is delightful as the devoted doggie, and Haydon and Bicha play the leaders of the cobra people with demonic flair. Haydon also directed and choreographed the elaborate piece that finds costume designers Glenn Krumbholz, Dwight Overton, Tina Sogliuzzo, and Birdie-Bob Watt at their most imaginative.
Koldewyn also provided the production with a chirpy song about cannibalism at a diner named after the Donner Party, and the whole extravaganza ends, as it must, with the lights-out spook show designed by Nicholas Torre. That's about the only expected thing in the unexpected world that arises each year in Shocktoberfest.
Shocktoberfest 16: Curse of the Cobra will run through Nov. 21 at the Hypnodrome. Tickets are $25-$35. Call (415) 377-4202 or go the hypnodrome.org.