Something Witched This Way Comes

It’s Macbeth meets “The Blair Witch Project.”

The buzz of last summer’s hottest horror film is crashing head-on with a cast of terrifying Shakespearean characters in “The Bard’s Witch Project,” performed this Halloween season by the Orange County High School of the Arts’ experimental theater group.

Expect it to be a hair-raiser, said instructor Stephen Whelan, who also directs the school’s experimental theater.

“It’s crazy and wild,” Whelan said. “There’s going to be a lot of blood.”

Performances will be held at McAuliffe Middle School in Los Alamitos Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m., plus a matinee at 2 p.m. Saturday.

As in the movie, this production is the tale of three student filmmakers lost in a forest on a cold October weekend. The students pitch a tent and pray that the supernatural forces of the dark--the ones they’ve come to document--don’t get to them first.

But here’s where OCHSA’s version takes its own dramatic license: Instead of being haunted by the Blair Witch, the student filmmakers are scared out of their wits by the witches of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and a troupe of other frightful characters from “Hamlet,” “Richard III,” “Othello,” “Julius Caesar,” “Titus Andronicus,” and even the comedic “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

While the film left much of the gore to the mind’s eye, this story leaves little to the imagination.

There’ll be murder, witches stirring caldrons of potions made from bits of dead animals and a human thumb, blood dripping from daggers--even a slit throat or two.

“I think people will be surprised--not just by the blood and gore,” said student actress Julie Schwartz, “but that something written so long ago includes everyday situations that we encounter today,” such as power, greed and ambition.

Instructor Whelan--who recently returned to the school’s musical theater department after seven years of working in Hollywood as a production associate to producer-director Martin Brest (“Scent of a Woman,” “Meet Joe Black”)--has bridged his theatrical and film worlds in a flash of creativity.

Not every theater group would be willing to try something so out there. Absurdist theater, Beckett, Sam Shepard? Sure. But Shakespeare meets pop horror?

Why not? asks Whelan. “Experimental theater is a place where kids can take risks.” And the 19 high school students performing in this decidedly offbeat spook fest are eating it up.

Just about everybody related to the “totally plain-faced fear” of “The Blair Witch Project,” Schwartz said. Now, she and fellow student actors are thrilled to introduce an audience to horror of a higher order.

Various Staging Techniques Are Used

“I think it’s a great way to connect Shakespeare with something that is modern and new,” said 18-year-old Gabe Cross, who plays Macbeth. “Our play brings Shakespeare to the present well.”

This production uses a variety of staging techniques, including live videotape projected to the audience on monitors, which was instrumental in the fresh approach of the film version.

“If you want to sit back and get a little literary knowledge, you won’t even know it. It’s sophisticated, scary and fun,” Schwartz said. “It’s going to really gross people out.”

The performing arts high school serves nearly 500 gifted and talented high-school-age students from 54 cities from Orange, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Diego counties, offering training on a tuition-free basis in classical-contemporary dance, commercial dance, instrumental music, musical theater, opera, production and design, and visual arts. The Theater Experiment is a repertory company offshoot of the musical theater department.

*

“The Bard’s Witch Project,” McAuliffe Middle School, 4112 Cerritos Ave., Los Alamitos. 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; also 2 p.m. Saturday. $5 for students and children; $6 for adults. Information: (562) 596-1435 or (714) 536-8597. Tickets available at the door.