Jobsite stages new version of haunted musical from Mellencamp and Stephen King

A musical by master scaremonger Stephen King and legendary rocker John Mellencamp? An intriguing combo, to be sure. But it might not be what you expect.

“It’s not ‘Cujo’ meets ‘Jack & Diane,’” Mellencamp has pointed out.

“Ghost Brothers of Darkland County” is something else—no rabid dogs or evil clowns, but a haunted story of two doomed love triangles. It’s King in mystery/thriller mode (as opposed to horror), with Mellencamp’s music in a bluesy country vein. And even though “Ghosts” premiered 13 years ago at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, a production that led to a concept album and a concert tour, the version opening at Jobsite Theater Oct. 15 is almost entirely new.

“What we’re doing,” Producing Artistic Director David Jenkins  told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, “has not been done before.”

In Atlanta, “Ghosts” was a two-act show with a huge cast and a full orchestra. Over the years, King and Mellencamp worked on refining the piece, keeping most of the songs but paring down the number of characters. The licensing company that’s handling the show approached Jobsite to see if they’d be interested in being the first regional theater company to produce the new version—possibly, Jenkins surmises, because of Jobsite’s past success with an adaptation of King’s “Misery” or because the company is well-known for its Halloween shows. 

Jenkins welcomed the opportunity, and he stresses that even if you saw the original or listened to the concept album, you’re in for a completely different experience with this incarnation of “Ghosts.” He’s staging it with eight actors and a four-piece blues rock band led by keyboardist and musical mastermind Jeremy Douglass, and it’ll run just 90 minutes.

“The storytelling mode goes back and forth between feeling like a ghost story around a backyard campfire to a hootenanny porch concert,” says Jenkins. “We’ve got microphones on stands. This isn’t a wireless mic situation.”

Even the dance in the show, choreographed by Alexander Jones, isn’t what you’d call “dance,” Jenkins says. It’s “vibin’, jukin’, groovin’”— definitely no jazz hands.

The scene design by Chris Giuffré will set the mood right away. “When people walk into the theater it’s going to be like walking into the back yard of an old cabin,” Jenkins added.

Inspired by the provocative silhouette art of Kara Walker, Giuffré is working with shadow play and silhouetting, and Jenkins is asking lighting designer Jo Averill-Snell to create as murky and shadowlike an ambience as possible. 

Which makes perfect sense for a story in which the present and the past echo and eventually overlap each other. It was inspired by Mellencamp’s experience renting a vacation cabin that was reputedly haunted. He was skeptical, but then the owner’s wife sent him news accounts of the triple homicide that had happened there many years before.

He brought the idea to King, who quickly came up with the tale of two fraught romances in different eras in which brothers are vying for the love of the same woman. In the original production, the narrative centered on the father of the feuding brothers; the current version ditches the dad and gives more prominence to the two women, played by Kayla Witoshynsky in the present (beloved by Cameron Kubly and Blake Smallen) and Noa Friedman in the past (caught between Alejandro Barba and Dylan Hannesson).

Jenkins loves that both women have a degree of agency that they didn’t possess in the earlier rendition—and that there’s more to both than we may think.

“In neither case are things what they seem,” he says. “And you really don’t find out the answers to those mysteries until the last couple minutes of the show.”

Driving the action (and invading the characters’ minds) is a shadowy figure called The Troubadour (Jonathan Harrison). 

He “weaves in and out of the story in moments of high tension,” says Jenkins. “He’s that thing in your head that makes you do bad things.” In the song “That’s Me” (performed on the concert album by Elvis Costello), The Troubador intones, “When you feel like cheating on your lover, that’s me, oh yes, that’s me.”

Also on hand is the decidedly sketchy Caretaker (Spencer Myers) who tells the present-day couple what happened in the cabin all those years ago. He’s in cahoots with The Troubador, and both get to sing the ominous blues anthem (performed by Taj Mahal on the album) “Tear This Cabin Down.”

“Basically they’re really creepy AF characters,” says Jenkins.

And they’re also our guides (if you can trust them).

Sounds like the kind of shivery, twisty Halloween treat that Jobsite audiences have come to expect around this time of year. Plus, there’s the unbeatable combo of King and Mellencamp, right? 

Well, yes but… their politics.

“Those liberal fuckheads!” growled one social media commenter, reacting to news of the production.

“I won’t give a dime to those woke fuckers!” vowed another.

Jenkins is, to say the least, bemused.

“This show is about as un-woke as it gets!” he protests. “It’s all about Southern-ass white people shooting each other! We can’t even have nice things at Halloween now… really?”

Sure we can. We can go to “Ghosts of Darkland County” at Jobsite—and while we’re there, we can bask in the knowledge that we’re supporting a musical by two of our finest liberal fuckheads.

Tickets for “Ghost Brothers of Darkland County” running Oct. 15-Nov. 9 at Tampa’s Jobsite Theater are still available and start at $29.50.

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This article appears in Oct. 9-15, 2025.