Unsung Heroes of Song of the Living Dead

July 7, 2008 admin 4 comments

On Thursday night I was able to participate as a Zombie Extra in Song of the Living Dead, the popular musical about….well…zombies.

Since I have not been on stage in front of people since probably 5th grade, I really didn’t know what I was getting into. All I did know was that the people in charge told me to, I quote:

“Bring clothes (interesting ones, not tshirt and jeans) to be fucked up/already fucked up for zombiewear.”

I didn’t exactly know what they meant by that, but I managed to find some fairly goofy clothing that I felt comfortable destroying. I decided to pick mostly white clothes. The thought process was that these would show blood and gore much better than say a black suite or something….the resulting transformation is below:

Thanks to my new zombie extra friends, John, Ed, Bill and Ruben (in the top picture), I was able to actually look like what I consider to be a pretty cool zombie. Below are the 4 simple steps to becoming a zombie:

Shred your clothes: The first thing they did when I arrived was take knife to all of my clothing.
Pour loads of fake gore and blood all over everything
Put make-up all over, including a base of yellow and a combination of sticky gore, green, purple and red.
Dash corn starch into your hair

Wolla…..I looked like a zombie. However, looking like a zombie is only good for pictures. Now I had to go figure out how to “act” like a zombie.

Now it was time for zombie acting 101. My zombie extra friends taught me how to do the following: zombie walk, zombie growl, scream brains (very lightly), move as if I have rigor and of course, give the 1000 yard zombie stare.

At this point, I look like a zombie, I think I can act like one, but could I pull it off on stage???

Once again, thanks to what I’ll call the unsung heroes of Song of the living dead, the zombie extras showed me the ropes, helped me hit all the right cues, and ultimately led me through what I consider a really fun night.

I was on the stage around 5 times. I’ve listed the highlights below:

In my on-stage debut, I got to kill someone right away….then I got shot and died on stage….only to be re-animated in the next scene!
I then was able to do the zombie walk out on stage….for a whole song, until all of the zombie extras lined up behind the main actor and lit some lighters above our heads, and slowly danced/swayed back and forth to the song….sounds goofy, but it was a ton of fun!

Anyway, my night as a zombie extra can only be categorized as awesome. An experience that I’m glad I didn’t pass up. Thanks again to everybody who helped me stumble through my first acting experience in like 20 years. Also, a special thanks to my good friend Sloane for helping me connect with the right people at Dad’s Garage!

For anybody interested, Song of the Living Dead has been extended, and you can still catch it until about mid-July.

You can buy tickets at the Dad’s Garage Website by clicking here