Last week I took my camera and visited Coney Island USA to speak with Dick Zigun about his upcoming rock musical “Bloody Brains in a Juke Box“.
BLOODY BRAINS IN A JUKEBOX!
A ROCK OPERA by CIUSA Founder and Artistic Director Dick D. Zigun (libretto) and Nikos Brisco (music), directed by Circus Amok’s Jennifer Miller
To be presented at Coney Island USA’s Sideshow by the Seashore
In this sung-through and psychedelic sci-fi satire, characters resembling Sidney Poitier, Audrey Hepburn, Jackie Coogan and Jayne Mansfield tussle with a talking, flying, brain-eating Wurlitzer Model 1100 juke box – with results as mind-blowing and out there as anything you’ve ever seen at the sideshow. Bloody Brains in a Jukebox is Coney Island USA’s most ambition stage production ever, wherein Dick Zigun’s libretto and Nikos Brisco’s music interface with the patented madness of Circus Amok and the talents of several alum of the Bread and Puppet Theater, including Ethyl Eichelberger award winning director Jennifer Miller.
While best known for such programs as the Mermaid Parade and the Coney Island Circus Sideshow, Coney Island USA has also been the longtime home of Funhouse Philosophers, a resident theater company devoted to presenting the plays of artistic director Dick Zigun, a Yale School of Drama and New Dramatists trained playwright whose previous works have included Dead End Dummy, Killing Republicans, The Ride Inspector’s Nightmare, and last season’s show The Education of Al Capone as Told by Jimmy Durante. In recent years, Funhouse Philosophers has been experimenting with the rock opera format in an effort to make abstract ideas like cosmology accessible via music and parody. Bloody Brains in a Jukebox is the culmination of that long-term exploration.
Funhouse Philosophers is the experimental theater company in residence at Coney Island, USA.
Help Funhouse Philosophers raise funds for our next production!
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