When You Close Your Eyes: scares, song and dance, and lesbians
22 Jun 2024 - Photos by Grayson Crompton

When I received an invitation to a sold out "original sapphic horror musical," I immediately replied in the affirmative. As any regular, or even casual, reader will know, horror and musicals are two genres I am passionate about but which are rarely combined. Both genres are deeply rooted in the queer experience and have been most successful when produced by queers. I would venture the same with horror musicals, though tragically I can only think of a handful, putting forward the assertion that Sweeny Todd is the pinnacle so far. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon but despite, or perhaps partly because of, the extensive content warnings, the theatre was indeed sold out. Sold out plus one person forced to settle for a spot on the steep stairs that serve as an aisle. It was also at this point that I discovered that this production of When You Close Your Eyes was a workshop, the third of three but the first to be fully staged. No matter, I was eager for some scares in song and dance.

When You Close Your Eyes is an ambitious piece with writer/composer Jessa Richer exploring some intriguing themes through genre lenses. Delaney (Julia Schwartz) is trapped in a small town tending to her overbearing dying mother (Calla Forrester). She works in a video store that seems to specialize in horror films. Her boss Will (Jameson Mosher [An Incomplete List of All the Things I'm Going to Miss When the World is No Longer) has a not so secret crush on Delaney. Enter tall drink of water new girl in town Vera (Josie Smith) who arouses feelings in Delaney and suspicions in Will. Vera has collected a group of women to attend her sleepovers: Esther (Erin Jennelle Teodoro) who is grieving her recently deceased sister, Maeve (Azaria Shams) who wants to become famous by any means necessary, and Charlotte (Emma Woodside) who just wants her cat to stop "pissing" in her bed. The newfound "sisters" bond as Vera explains that "The human body is only a container, cut the strings." Of course there are rituals and knives involved.

At that point the plot takes a sci-fi turn with the rituals taking Delaney to "the middle place" where colourful wraiths cavort and a horned and veiled woman, Vera's grandmother (Callan Forrester), has some sort of authority. Delaney is a chosen one, Vera is annoyed at being passed over, and the sisters start to die gruesomely. The confusion of the plot could be compensated for with spooky suspense in the gothic tradition, and that is almost accomplished by the songs. As in the best musicals, characters express what is too intense for words with lyrics and melody. Richer's songs are firmly in a pop rock mode with arrangements that rely effectively on electronic bump in the night beats and sparse Hermmann-esque synthesizer strings. Lyrically the desires or dilemmas are expressed effectively with Teodoro being given a chance to stand and deliver that stands out. Unfortunately the tempos very rarely push past ballad pace which creates a similarity and a funereal pace. On the other hand it pays off for Shams, when she gets a tap number, the effect is electric and galvanizing. 

The number also works because it risks exposing the dangers of the horror musical genre: camp and unintentional comedy. Neither is dangerous if that is the aim, Evil Dead the Musical will always have a place in my heart. However if terror is the intention and the response is laughter, nervous relief laughter after a jump scare excluded, there is a problem. There are places where When You Close Your Eyes achieves horror—Teodorro's ritual cutting and Smith's bloody dance—but the finale is problematic. The entire show simmers with lesbian heat and would actually have benefitted if that had been allowed to boil over. Yet the big number at the end, the resolution of the dilemmas, the 11 o'clock numger, goes to Mosher. Not that he doesn't sing it well and with ringing emotion, it is just that the restoration of patriarchal values can only be seen as camp in this context. It is not the relief one gets at the end of a horror film when the monster is vanquished, we were all rooting for the killer lesbians. Or that his thick mascara signified a queer layer.

Director Ally Chozik makes a little stretch a long way. There are occasional confusions regarding place and time (the middle place remains woefully undefined) but when there is a spooky set piece/dance number, it is visually irresistible. All of the performances are committed, fine voiced and physically present, undercut only by the inability to avoid occasional camp. There is an intriguing effect when characters watch movies, projected flickering on their faces. Like the Scream franchise, the characters are aware of horror clichés and somehow that becomes an homage to Nightmare on Elm Street.and references back to the title When You Close Your Eyes. Vera sings, "When you close your eyes, that's when you really see. That's when you're free." But one also closes one eyes in anticipation of the scariest parts, the goriest parts, of a horror film. 

Below the content warning posted in the lobby and after the same in the program, is a note explaining that we are about to "experience violence and horror as a form of entertainment; fiction." Catharsis in other words. The note goes on to explain that for some people in other parts of the world, violence and horror aren't entertainment, they are a horrific reality. That becomes the key. Horror helps us process feelings and experiences we are afraid of, musicals help us express feelings and experiences that are too powerful to be processed. A parallel dichotomy that When You Close Your Eyes tries to resolve. I look forward to the fourth workshop but offer a humble suggestion: dive into the feelings. Scare us with the gore and violence (the one instance of realistic bloodshed was powerful), seduce us with more rampant and explicit lesbianism (Delaney and Vera's near kiss was electric), and play with the tempos and key changes so that the voices and emotions can soar. It will be wonderful to have audiences leaving the theatre humming in terror.