Monster Boogie at Broom Street Theater

Broom Street’s new show explores both scary stories, ridiculously terrible scenes

Broom Street Theater 1119 Williamson, Madison, WI

Elliott Puckette, Arts Editor

There’s still time is see a very spooky show over at Broom Street Theater. Rob Matsushita has a new show “Monster Boogie” playing its final weekend Thursday, March 3 through Saturday, March 5 at 8 p.m.

This is Matsushita’s fifth installment in his experimental “Boogie” series, in which he takes old music and spoken word records and gets actors to act them out, lip syncing the words.

“Boogies” can have many themes. Over the years there has been Superhero Boogie, Boogie of the Apes, Christmas Boogie, and Boogie After Dark. That last featured tracks specifically chosen for their raunchiness.

Monster Boogie explores scary stories, from the Twilight Zone slow building horror to Count Chocula and friends at a disco competition. The whole show was ceremoniously mastered by Jessica Jane Witham, who “voiced” all the narrations and was the only actor to actually speak.

Witham improvised and goofed around with the audience serving as the host, an actor, and as an avatar of Matsushita, sharing his enthusiasm for these outdated, fun, and sometimes ridiculously terrible scenes.

The actors were cast with little regard for gender, a necessary decision for a cast with more women than men, but far fewer female roles than male.

It hardly matters, however, because each actor brought attitude and texture to their characters that made it easy to ignore that the voice didn’t match the body, which was just as true when the actors played their own genders.

The show doesn’t take it self seriously at all. Rather, it is a passion project that one man has brought to an audience.

It’s silly and over-the-top and great fun, and some of the scenes were actually hair-raising.

Most were silly, and featured classic characters doing poorly written things. Dracula meets Dr. Frankenstein and werewolves are involved. The Ghostbusters behave out-of-character. Freddie Krueger sings a cute little song.

There’s plenty of room for nostalgia and bring out your inner-child, the one who listened to these stories or something similar and bounced around in the theater of the mind. Matsushita was that kid, and then brought the the theater of the mind to the stage.

Tickets are $11, you can buy at the door or reserve online at bstonline.org.