Requiem for a Gumshoe

 From the mad geniuses that brought you the Dora Award Winning Space Opera Zero! comes Part II of the Apocalypse Trilogy

Eldritch Theatre presents…REQUIEM FOR A GUMSHOE

 by Eric Woolfe with bits stolen from Snorri Sturluson

Requiem for a Gumshoe is a freakish delight.”Istvan Reviews

“Profoundly creative…virtuoso performances. I didn’t want the show to end.” -Leslie Barcza

A weird-noir, hardboiled, cosmic-horror mystery told with sultry actors, terrifying puppets and dark, arcane magic. A warlock running from his past. A woman running from the End of the World.

“It’s as if the Norse Legend of Ragnarok was the bastard love child of HP Lovecraft
and Raymond Chandler.”     – Eric Woolfe, Artistic Director

Rick Fischmascher is a rumpled private detective and warlock for hire, haunted by the death of his son, and entrenched in the arcane murder of a troubled opera singer. And he’s the chief suspect. Requiem for a Gumshoe is a weird-noir, hardboiled mystery, re-telling the Norse legend of Ragnarok in the pulpy style of Raymond Chandler infused with the cosmic horror of HP Lovecraft.

“Eric Woolfe is one of the city’s genuine, gloriously obsessive originals. No other local theatre company has as completely-defined an aesthetic as his Eldritch Theatre, which specializes in imaginative, lo-fi, old-school horror and mystery stories, with puppetry and a bit of magic thrown into the mix.” NNNN Glen Sumi, NOW Magazine

“Requiem for a Gumshoe is guaranteed to be unlike anything else you can see in Toronto.”
Janine Marley, A View From the Box

REQUIEM FOR A GUMSHOE
November 24th – December 4th 2022

At the ghoulishly refurbished Red Sandcastle Theatre 922 Queen Street East, Toronto

Evenings 7:00PM Doors/7:30 Showtime
Matinee 3:00PM Doors/3:30 Showtime

90 minutes, no intermission

Eldritch Member Tickets $15/$20
$20 Tuesdays/$30 Advance/$40 Door/PWYC Sundays and introducing Socially Distanced Wednesdays

Directed by Dylan Trowbridge

Performed by Mairi Babb, Lisa Norton & Eric Woolfe

Set & Costumes Designed by Melanie McNeill
Design Assistant JB Nelles
Sound Design by Verne Good
Lighting Design by Gareth Crew
Puppets by Eric Woolfe
Stage Managed by Sandi Becker
Produced by Adrianna Prosser
Poster Designed by Michael Ripley

Eric Woolfe is one of the city’s genuine, gloriously obsessive originals. No other local theatre company has as completely-defined an aesthetic as his Eldritch Theatre, NNNN Glen Sumi NOW Magazine
“…virtuoso performances.<br />
I didn’t want the show to end.” BarczaBlog
"guaranteed to be unlike anything else you can see in Toronto...<br />
truly a pleasure to watch." A view from the box

Cast + Creative

Mairi Babb

Mairi Babb

Alice

Mairi became the Head Witch of the Dread Coven of Danforth Avenue at the tender age of 13 when she shoved Prickled Gertie Rumplehump into a wood burning stove, baked her into a tortiere,and stole her broomstick and crown. Mairi’s voice can hit notes so high, that only creatures of the night can hear them. She has danced with the Mi-Go on Signal Hill, had tea with the Black Goat of the Forest, and painted her own kitchen with the Colours out of Space. Small children fear her. It is said that on nights when the moon is gibbous, she sneaks through your bedroom window as you sleep, and sits on your chest, and when your nightmares begin, she smiles and inhales the life from your body as your panicked, yet slumbering, breath ebbs from your dying body. As you drift into death, her red, red eyes are the last things you see. And you yearn for them. Dear gods! You yearn for them!

Lisa Norton

Lisa Norton

Myrna

Lisa was there when the first ghost story was told by the first campfire. She was there when the first child heard the first monster under their bed. She was crouching in the shadows the first time a mother warned her daughter not to stray off the path. And she laughed with pleasure the first time a dreamer woke screaming from the terrors of night. Lisa Norton is not her real name. Her real name is written on the frozen stones of the Plateau of Leng, and is unpronounceable by the human tongue. In older times, crouching primitives and slavering cultists called her the Cackling Terror, the Ice Mad Hag, The Render of Strange Bones, and even She Who Knows That Which Kills And Feeds. In this age we call her Lisa Norton. But she laughs with derision each time we speak it. And she will be here, long after we are gone.

 

Eric Woolfe

Eric Woolfe

Fischmasher/Puppet Creator/Playwright

Eric Woolfe was born the bastard child of an itinerant sideshow contortionist, and a door-to-door alienist. He began his career at the age of eight and three quarters, when a national famine forced him to follow his mother’s twisted feet into show business. Following failed careers as a learned pig tamer, flea circus promoter, and gaffed armless calligrapher, he formed Eldritch Theatre after losing a bar bet. He is now an actor, writer and puppeteer, as well as being a noted spiritualist huckster. He is often visited by the ghost of his beloved miniature schnauzer, Schubert, who offers Mister Woolfe valuable career advice, such as “You should chase more squirrels,” and “You better hide in the basement when there is thunder outside.” Mr Woolfe has many credits, projects and award nominations, but his favourite by far is George A Romero’s maritime western zombie masterpiece, Survival of the Dead

Dylan Trowbridge

Dylan Trowbridge

Director

Dylan Trowbridge is the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, and so his father knew he would never come to no good. When he turned 13, his father saw that the change was a gunna come, and locked Dylan deep down in the earthen cellar of the family domicile to prevent the boy from a doing harm to the other kith and kin. Well, that young Dylan, he cried piteously for the first night or two, but once that gibbous moon turned to full, all that weeping and a wailing started to sound more like a growling and a howling, and that’s when the Trowbridge family knew the youngest of their clan could never be let out of the hole. 

 

Melanie McNeill

Melanie McNeill

Designer

Melanie is a set and costume designer who created the non-Euclidian, mad-blasted, architecturally anomalous, temple of unholy abomination, known to the students at Miskatonic University as the Pit with a Thousand Steps. Her efforts on this project won her two Dora Mavor Moore Awards, a pickled Siamese twin in a mayonnaise jar, and a thirty-year stint in a padded room at Ravenscrag Asylum for the Mentally Deranged. It is said that her fingernails are made of needles, and to look into her eyes is to see one’s darkest, most secret fears writ large across the sky, in words penned in streaks of lightning. I have feared many dark things in my life. But I fear Melanie most of all.

Sandi Becker

Sandi Becker

Stage Manager

Sandi Becker strikes fear into the hearts of the weak and foolish. She has retractable fangs. And, due to a recurring battle with Early Onslaught Lycanthropy, has become a passionate advocate for promoting tolerance to Werewolfism in school age children. She can kill you with a look, and if you are not in bed by 9 o’clock, she’ll come to you in the darkness, slip you into a bag made from cat skin, and take you to her moldy, mildewed lair. What will happen there? No one has lived to tell the tale.

 

Verne Good

Verne Good

Sound Designer

Verne is a Scion of the Elder Gods made entirely out tentacles and ears. Hundreds and hundreds of tentacles. Thousands and thousands of ears. With her eldritch ears she beholds sounds that are unimaginable to the human mind, and inaudible to all but the most ancient of horrid creatures. She can hear the screams of skin follicles as they die, and flake from your scalp, with awful, heart felt moans. She beholds the verminous, incessant chittering of the microscopic mites that live in your eyelashes. And to her, the almost silent susurrus of your mourning soul is a deafening, cacophonous din, louder than the loudest exploding star. There is no murmuration in the infinite chaos of howling infinity that Verne Good does not hear. That is what she does with her multitudinous ears… What she does with her tentacles is a horror that none should ever know.

JB Nelles

JB Nelles

Design Assistant

Last night, around midnight, I saw JB NELLES in a shadow cast by the light of the moon, and in that silver, pallid effulgence, I witnessed a horror that I shall render me sleepless till my dying day. JB Nelles may look human; they are not. Their true face, a face of indescribable horror, can only be glimpsed when the moon is gibbous and the stars are right. For I beheld their gaping maw grow cavernous, and vast, with a multiplicity of razor sharp teeth, dripping with viscous drool and steaming blood. They ate small children in that strange lunar glow, and kittens, and an old hobo the neighbours called Stew Sock Jim. They even swallowed a sewer rat hole. When I see JB by daylight, I will smile and say hello. But if ever I meet them again by moonlight, I’ll run. Dear lord, how I will run!
Adrianna Prosser

Adrianna Prosser

Producer + Marketing

Adrianna is a dead, red-headed girl who lurks in the bottom of an old, dry well. And if you throw a penny in, and whisper a little wish, she scoops your words up, in her cracked, grey hands, and swallows them, chewing your dreams into tiny, broken little pieces, so they can never come true. That’s why, some nights, when you can’t sleep and you are all alone in the darkness, you almost hear the empty susurrus of distant cackling. That is Red Dead Adrianna, at the bottom of the well, giggling maniacally over your masticated dreams.

Gareth Crew

Gareth Crew

Lighting Designer

Gareth has seen you before. And you saw him. Do you remember that night, when you were very small, and you woke from a deep sleep with a start? You thought you heard a noise, a scratching at your window. But you couldn’t be sure; the curtains were closed. But then it came again… Skritch. Skritch. Skritch. You wanted to run, or at least hide under your covers. With ever fibre of your being you wanted to scream for your parents to come get you, and rescue you, and spirit you away to the safety of their bed. But you couldn’t move. You were frozen in place. You couldn’t even gasp in terror…. Skritch. Skritch. Skritch… The sound came again. Your eyes were glued to the curtain, as it began to move of it’s own accord. And there! In the darkness, starring from the other side of the chilly glass, was a man with ice for eyeballs. And a meat hook for a nose. Well… that was Gareth Crew.

Eric Woolfe as Rick Fischmascher and Mairi Babb in mask

Eric Woolfe as Fischmasher, Mairi Babb as Chickletts McGee

Photo by Adrianna Prosser

Mairi Babb in mask as the opera singer with Eric Woolfe as Rick Fasichmascher

Mairi Babb as Gloria Signet and Eric Woolfe as Fischmasher

Photo by Adrianna Prosser

Mairi Babb and Lisa Norton as The Librarians in masks with bushy eyebrows and mustaches and long gold cloaks

Mairi Babb and Lisa Norton as The Librarians

Photo by Adrianna Prosser

Doctor masked character and nurse masked character sit behind Rick Fischmascher played by Eric Woolfe, a Detective in a long trench coat and eye patch

Lisa Norton as Doctor Prometheus Ütgard, Eric Woolfe as Fischmasher, Mairi Babb as The Nurse

Photo by Adrianna Prosser

Mairi Babb as Chickletts, Eric Woolfe as Fischmasher, Lisa Norton as Tunkman

Photo by Adrianna Prosser

Mairi Babb as Chickletts, Eric Woolfe as Fischmasher, Lisa Norton as Tunkman

Photo by Adrianna Prosser

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