MANSON: THE MUSICAL
I tried desperately to get someone to go with me to see this double bill. Through the years I’ve taken friends to see some of my choice theater assignments–acrobatic rats, Kabuki G-string dancers, and even a guy who wrapped himself in duct tape while talking about scoring dope (I liked that one a lot; my companion’s reaction was mixed). But Manson: The Musical had no takers. You can go too far, my friends said. The whole thing sounded immoral to them. I went alone.
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Club Victoria’s disco ball and gawking suburban heterosexual couples are gone now, replaced on the night I saw Metraform’s shows by a rat pack of what seemed like fraternity brothers. They spent intermission picking on a heavy-metal, dressed-in-black-from-head-to-toe couple sitting in a back corner. “Dickheads,” the heavy-metal dude said in response. The frat rats laughed and laughed. The only point of agreement was the show, which both sides loved. Still, I’m not sure that anyone in the audience had ever had a real LSD trip–a featured part of the show–or actually known a hippie.
The story is familiar enough: Manson, aspiring singer-songwriter and antichrist, sets up his very own dysfunctional family with a bunch of runaway girls at the deserted Spahn Ranch. Clutzy Tex Watson, the only other male, is a eunuch of sorts who serves as Manson’s repairman and henchman. Together they eat rotting vegetables, have a lot of sex, praise Manson’s every deranged word, and, one day, out of sheer boredom, go off to kill Sharon Tate and her friends.
There’s a point in the play when the Ragamuffin feeds the kids a barbecued chicken, which they savagely devour. Later, he gives the chicken carcass to the live chicken, who tears it apart as she eats. The frat rats and the heavy-metal pair liked this one a lot.
