Photo by Jennifer Ring
(L-R) Zombie Beach cast members Genesis Wiley, CC Ventura, Diane Weber, Tripp Peavyhouse, and Kasey Scott.
But thanks to Nick at Nite—the nighttime block of programming on then-fledgling cable station Nickelodeon—the ‘80s turned into the ‘60s around 8 p.m. After the kids watched “Double Dare” and “You Can’t Do That on Television” and went to bed, their parents watched “Mr. Ed,” “My Three Sons” and “The Patty Duke Show.”
“If you were a teenager, you stayed up too late, stealing your mom’s vodka and replacing it with water…” Cecil told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay in a phone interview. “And we would watch Nick at Nite. So it’s the era when MC Hammer and Milli Vanilli are ruling the airwaves, and I have opinions on ‘The Patty Duke Show’…The past is happening at the same time as the present.”
Despite growing up in the ‘80s, Cecil grew up watching 1960s television and films on basic cable. Two of his favorite films from this era are William Asher’s comedy “Beach Blanket Bingo” and Ed Wood’s sci-fi classic “Plan Nine from Outer Space.” Both movies were filmed in Los Angeles—“Plan Nine from Outer Space” in the late 1950s and “Beach Blanket Bingo” in the early 1960s. Both are B movies turned cult classics, but that’s where the similarities end.
“Beach Blanket Bingo” is a California beach vacation where happy teenagers dance and fall in love. “Plan Nine from Outer Space” is a dystopian nightmare where aliens come to Earth and raise the dead. And that is how zombies ended up on a beach in California in the 1960s in John Cecil’s “Zombie Beach: The Musical.” In real life, “Zombie Beach” began in a New York City tiki bar called Otto’s Shrunken Head on E 14th Street.
“It was October 2012, and we were putting these shows on in a bar, and we were getting press,” Cecil told CL. “The Village Voice wrote about us, people were coming to see it, and we were going to have an industry night on Halloween 2012. So we were gearing up, we’d sent out the invitations, and we were starting to get RSVPs. And then, that weekend, Hurricane Sandy hit New York City...”
“There’s a Con Edison power plant very close to the venue,” Cecil continues. “14th Street was the line where the electricity went off. Everything south of 14th Street was the wild west for maybe two weeks. Everything north of 14th Street was business as usual by the next day. The venue where we had the play was on the south side of 14th Street, facing north. So literally eight feet away would have been fine, but the venue was flooded and was without power, so we had to call that show off.”
Then Cecil had a kid, and “Zombie Beach” was, for many years, forgotten. “I’d struggled with pitching it, too,” says Cecil, who’d become discouraged by the confused look on producers’ faces whenever he said, “It’s ‘Beach Blanket Bingo’ meets ‘Plan Nine from Outer Space.’”
Ten years later, somehow, things had changed. Cecil has a few ideas about why “Zombie Beach” is better received now than a decade ago. Among them, he cites Gen Z’s love of all things retro. “Now, when I say ‘Beach Blanket Bingo’ meets ‘Plan Nine from Outer Space,’ everyone seems to know what I’m talking about,” Cecil told CL.
When Cecil told Tampa actor Mike McGreevy—a friend from PCCA who’d never moved away—about “Zombie Beach,” McGreevy passed the info along to LAB Theatre’s founding producer, Owen Robertson. He was looking to do a musical, and McGreevy told him, “I know a guy who has one.”
And that is how Tampa gets to experience zombies singing in a cemetery on a California Beach. "Zombie Beach" runs through Saturday, April 8 at the Mainstage Theatre at Hillsborough Community College in Ybor City.
Taking it back to the tiki bar, Cecil describes his musical as much like the tiki bar menu classic, crab rangoon.
“Crab rangoon is not an actual thing,” Cecil reminds me. “Victor Bergeron aka Trader Vic, one of the first tiki bar owners, created this dish, and it’s cream cheese, fried wonton and crabmeat…So at some point, he thinks, ‘What I want to do is take crab meat and sell it in these deep-fried wonton wrappers, and I’m going to put cream cheese in there too.’ These three things—it’s weird that someone put them together, but it works really well.”
“I had the crab meat of ‘Beach Blanket Bingo’ and the cream cheese of ‘Plan Nine from Outer Space’ and ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ but I didn’t have the wonton shell yet,” Cecil continues. “And the wonton shell was ‘It’s a musical.’”
“Now there’s a glue that holds things together, and those are the songs,” Cecil told CL. “It didn’t take any time at all to think to myself, ‘The songs should be [like] The Cramps, The Misfits, The Ramones, Alice Cooper, Link Wray, Dick Dale, The Beach Boys.”
Cecil’s musical inspirations range from horror-inspired punk rock to California-style surf rock.
When I asked him, “If a zombie could sing, what sort of songs would a zombie sing?” he hesitated momentarily. Then he replied, “If a zombie could sing, I have a very strong suspicion that they would sing similar to the mid-60s Elvis comeback era—‘Blue Hawaii’ era Elvis.”
This should be interesting
