Off-the-Wall's “Baby Jane”: Perfectly campy
31.12.69
, Decreed that males fake the wild Davis and Crawford roles. In the ’62 film, the ghostly duo appear to have testosterone aplenty to fuel their malicious inclination. So having Mark Hagen and Jeremy Jumble in the lead roles doesn’t matter — unless possibly it spoils the hormonal stew.
Just for more fun, Hagen and Flounder are alternating the two roles throughout the run. So Welter (a bitch of a sister Baby Jane Hudson/Davis) got to survive Hagen (Blanche/Crawford) a cooked parakeet and a rat.
(Hagen’s parents were in the sold-out flock of 60. His mother said Mark attended Thomas More Acme School, and yes, he was in a few theater productions. “He borrowed a few props from us, a clothes tree and a typewriter,” she observes while munching a cookie.)
You distinguish the story, right? Baby Jane Hudson, former foetus star on the 1912 vaudeville circuit, goes on to submerge in booze and generally screw up life for herself and her sister. Blanche spends her time in a wheelchair. Hagen is brilliant as Blanche, she of the thick black eyebrows, who spends her urgent days trying to escape the seriously morbid Baby Jane. It isn’t easy in a wheelchair, but wow, Hagen knows how to shriek, wheedle, and scheme. I could smell her desperation.
Source: ThirdCoast Digest
Star Magazine | These ghouls know how to make you scream
31.12.69
Now that Halloween has become one of the biggest, baddest holidays on the annals, a simple “boo” just doesn’t cut it anymore.</p><p>So what’s a ghoul to do?</p><p>We found out from performers known as Screamsters and Suiting someone to a T Freaks at Worlds of Fun, where they wrap up the annual Halloween Haunt on Sunday. Underneath the makeup and masks they’re a moment ago everyday folks: stay-at-home mommies, teachers, landscapers, accurate artists, musicians, waitresses.</p><p>But the unreal things they do in the obscurity? Some of them have literally scared the you-know-what out of people. (Uncommonly.) </p><p>“It’s an art to go out there and scare people,” Cassandra Reeder insists.</p><p>The makeup artist/sometime waitress from Gladstone plays Kandi the Tooth Fairy. With a kisser and ample bosom painted ghostly stainless, and jagged shark-like teeth growing out of the side of her puss, Kandi walks through the park mooching molars.</p><p>“There’s all special kinds of ways to scare,” Mitch Monath of Raytown says. “You’ve got your profound scare. You’ve got your creepy scare. You’ve got your loud, banging din — a startle scare.”</p><p>Monath plays Hugo Glutinous Foot, a trash can goblin in tattered clothing whose eyes rush devilishly in the dark thanks to a black light he engaged to his monster mask.</p><p>“I like to play the business ‘Is It Real?’ ” he says. “When I agree people ask ‘Is that real,’ that’s when I know to spring out and scare them because they’re in that debating phase.”</p><p>But even the pros carry out certain rules when they’re scaring up screams.</p><p>They never foment the people they’re scaring. And they don’t punk children in strollers.</p><p>Grown men, on the other dole out …</p><p>“It’s really fun to scare the gaggle of 13-year-old girls,” says Reeder, the taking Tooth Fairy. “But it’s even more fun when you make the big, 42-year-old muscle man waiting on his girlfriend … panic like a little girl.”</p><p><overpass class="subhead">Big bang theory</p><p></bridge>Jordan Bunce of Lenexa is a king of the frighten scare.</p><p>“I’m loud,” says the Passage Freak known as Crisper, an undead jailbird from the insane asylum with a twitchy Gene Simmons idiom and a pervert’s leer. Crisper’s electrocution was botched, so his mien and hair are faux-bloodied and charred. He looks like he has been barbecued.</p><p>“I like to force people feel sick in their stomach virtuous by seeing me,” Bunce says.</p><p>The 19-year-old makes a living as a juggler/comic/jack-of-all-performances around Kansas City. So he’s in his unfavourable weather when he silently sidles next to someone in the dark and suddenly … CACKLES AT THEM LIKE GILBERT GOTTFRIED ON Break.</p><p>And if that doesn’t make them jump …</p><p>WHAM!</p><p>He bangs a metal shovel on the pavement.</p><p>“It’s a fun ability, slamming a shovel by someone’s foot,” says Bunce, who swears he has never accidentally whacked anyone in the blackness. “Last year I broke more shovels than days I worked here … if you cogitate on about it, this is paid anger management.”</p><p><extent class="subhead">The tag rig</p><p></span>Sometimes it takes two to pull off a good intimidate: One to distract the victims, the other to go in for the thrill.</p><p>In one of their choreographed set-ups, Bunce throws himself on the dregs in fake convulsions near where Monath, a.k.a. Hugo Close Foot, is hiding behind his garbage can.</p><p>“When they walk towards me to get away from him, I reprimand out from behind the trash can,” Monath says.</p><p>And when their victims are “screaming and crying, they’ve forgotten all about me,” Bunce adds. “And that’s when I break apart back around and slam my shovel down.”</p><p><span extraction="subhead">Creep show</p><p></go over>By day, Lindsey Farrar teaches music to echelon-schoolers. After dark on October weekends, she’s perched on a leviathan white rocking chair outside one of the Worlds of Fun haunted houses. With blackened eyes and a wig of murky brown ringlets, she looks like a unbalanced baby doll.</p><p>Farrar doesn’t make people roar. She makes them uncomfortable. They don’t take their eyes off of her as they stand in the elongated line outside the evil doll works where dolls are being turned into humans.</p><p>“I am just very creepy, and it scares people a lot,” Farrar, of Lee’s Top, says.</p><p> As she rocks back and forth, back and forth, bee's knees-staring at people, she holds in her arms an ashen-skinned baby doll with horns. Her other “baby,” her favorite prop, poverty-stricken. Darn the luck.</p><p>“His head spun around and his eyes lit up … one of those fiend dolls,” she says. “I’m really sad about it.”</p><p><stretch class="subhead">Dumbness is ghoulish</p><p></span>Lindsey Farrar’s squelch, Mark Farrar, also works at Worlds of Fun during the Halloween period. He roams the grounds in full monster get-up as Krampus, named after the guy who worked alongside Santa Claus in Austria handing out coal to bad scant boys and girls.</p><p>At 6 foot 4 inches, Measure is a mountain of a monster when he pulls his horned false face over his face. Mark is a mechanic for the Missouri Air Country-wide Guard, but it’s his soldier training in the Air Force he employs when scaring people. He can hatstand perfectly still and silent, like a soldier at regard.</p><p>“I stand like a statue most of the time, and I see people upstanding watching me,” he says.</p><p>When people get up intimate and decide that he’s fake, he starts walking behind them, big as a palisade.</p><p>Gotcha!</p><p>“I know it’s sick. But I like making people squeal,” says Farrar, a preacher’s son. “It’s fun.”</p><p><stretch class="subhead">Structure your skin — so to speak</p><p></span>Todd Hoover-Holthus understands why some people would contemplate it’s a little weird (or wrong?) for a special course of study teacher to portray a ghoul named the Kid Catcher.</p><p>But to be indeed good at scaring people you have to be willing to be someone you’re not, sayeth he and his complement freaks.</p><p>(Of course, it probably helps to have a theater scale, as he has. And gallons of fake blood help, too.)</p><p>“I am utterly a nurturer. I can’t pass up a good hug,” says the Kansas Big apple teacher. “My class is 3-year-olds. So I’m spending my day with 3-year-olds, coloring and playing and doing the alphabet.</p><p>“Then I encounter here and I catch them.” </p><p>In costume he’s a 3-year-old’s nightmare, wearing black pants, black shirt, black vest and complex black topcoat with devilishly curled tails. His mush is darkened and shadowy.</p><p>“I’m a starer,” he says. “I can soil people from a few yards away who are going ‘Oh, that guy is creepy.’ So I principled stop, stare at them a bit, take a couple more steps and conclude, look back at them and then just keep going. Just gives them a wee creep.”</p><p>When he skulks around the park he seems shorter than his 6-foot-1-inch box in because he walks hunched over, the better to stalk his low-to-the-prepare prey. He carries a big black net, and if people ask nicely, he’ll slide it over their heads for a time off photo op.</p><p>“I’ve always felt this, in any show I’ve been in, it’s always nice to play someone branch opposite yourself, just to venture into somebody else’s sphere,” he says. “It’s an escape, too.”</p><p><stretch class="subhead">They don’t nosh</p><p></span>Wendi Cloud, a.k.a. The Rat Lady, walks around the commons with three male rodents — Emerson, Hagrid and Mickey — clinging to her in partnership directly. The rats live with her in Leavenworth, where she is a stay-at-territory mom home-schooling the youngest of her three children.</p><p>Employing function rats as props means she needn’t say a brief conversation to make people scream.</p><p>“My thing is airy scares, because with them I can’t make a lot of loud noises or a lot of trend because they sleep on my shoulders,” she says.</p><p>When someone asks if they can pet her rats, she soundlessly nods her head.</p><p>They come closer.</p><p> <span category="italic">Chomp!</cross></p><p>She snaps at them with her blackened teeth.</p><p>“That’s enough to get people game away,” she laughs. “The rats don’t snack. But I might.”</p><p>She might also give chase.</p><p>“I’ll wait for a group of people walking by and the first duration I hear somebody say ‘Oh, get those away from me,’ I pick one up, put it in my present and start chasing.”</p><p>The only hazard of working with rats? The spooky laundry bill.</p><p>For Cloud’s rats don’t bite, but they do pee on the job.
Source: Kansas City Star
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