Blood, guts and a little bit of laughs

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This article was published 11/04/2025 (516 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Before they started preparing for this weekend’s performances of Evil Dead: The Musical in October, the Manitoba Theatre for Young People’s musical theatre company first needed to bond in the land of the living.

“We generally took a lot of time to play games and get to know each other before really diving into the script. I think it’s important to build that chemistry before we start killing each other,” says 17-year-old Jordan Bremner.

In the young person’s version of the musical, a Canadian-made adaptation of The Evil Dead — a supernatural horror comedy from 1981 that has enjoyed the pleasant afterlife of a cult classic — the cast wades into a spooky boreal forest, encountering wicked trees, buzzy chainsaws and buckets upon buckets of crimson blood.

“The opening song, Cabin in the Woods, gives a very good first impression of the musical, but it feels a little off-putting because it’s so bouncy and fun,” says Sophie Vermeylen, 17.

“And of course, the musical is bouncy and fun, but it’s not showing that it’s going to be a horror story yet. It’s about five college students going to an abandoned cabin in the woods, and what can go wrong with that?”

Before October, most of the cast, whose ages range from 13 to 18, hadn’t seen the original film series, but that soon changed with group watch parties, where they came to appreciate the silliness lurking under the movies’ gory surface.

The musical, which debuted in a more adult format in Toronto in 2003, takes the humour and wackiness up a dozen notches, the actors say during a group interview on Tuesday during tech week.

“This note is for everyone — louder singing during Necronomicon,” director J. Kooymans tells the cast, sitting in a circle on the floor of the MTYP lobby. “I know you’re technically dead, but still, louder!”

Some members of the cast were overtly familiar with the Evil Dead universe, including Scout Simkulet and Amalia Hickerson.

“My dad loves this movie, so when he found out we were doing this musical, he was so excited. I didn’t have to explain anything,” says Simkulet, who also got to doodle some witchy drawings in Niamh Ukrainec’s Necronomicon prop, the book that unleashes a series of unfortunate events upon the unsuspecting co-eds.

“He asked me if there was going to be a splash zone,” says MTYP school director Spenser Payne with a laugh, confirming that the first few rows should brace for a little bit of ooze.

Hickerson, 16, has been obsessed with the series since watching every film during a one-night session in Grade 7.

Hickerson is also one of several cast members who claim to have encountered the supernatural.

“My house is haunted by my great-great-grandfather, specifically,” she says.

The cast, who also worked on props and choreography, came around quickly to the show’s blend of guts and side-splitting humour.

“I didn’t listen to the musical before rehearsal. I just showed up and we started reading through it and then everyone got killed off and turned into demons. I was freaking out: what did I sign up for? Why is everyone a demon? How are we going to make this happen onstage?” recalls Tessa Laver-Wright, 18.

To accommodate the larger cast size, the ensemble’s roles expanded to include more demonic characters, evil trees and possessed household objects. Recent young company productions have included Something Rotten, Urinetown and Shrek Jr., an altogether different stage musical which begins at a ramshackle cabin in the woods, or in the swamp.

The actors each played a part in creating their demonic personas onstage.

“We all made our own masks for when we turn into demons to signify that we’ve changed from our normal, everyday characters,” says 14-year-old Avee Forest, whose boil-covered mask is made from styrofoam, papier-mâché and acrylic paint.

Payne, who took on the school’s directorship in 2024, says she chose the musical because it’s Canadian-made, it’s fun and it’s memorable.

“I feel like everyone’s having a really good time and caring about each other and that was my hope.”

“It’s just a different type of friendship than the ones you have with people who don’t do theatre,” says actor Finn Deck.

Noor ‘t Jong agrees.

“I love the quirky little community we’ve built. I get to come to this little oasis after a really hard week at school to find these people who are singing, dancing and being silly all the time and they’re all so passionate and talented,” she says.

For this group of young performers, the cursed cabin in the woods has become an oasis on the prairie.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com

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