‘Wicked Bayou’ visits a dark world in a phenomenal musical dance performance

Denver’s Wonderbound teams with a ‘zombie death polka band’ in a must-see show for the Halloween season

As a contemporary ballet company that prides itself on innovative collaborations, it’s tough to think of a better pairing for Wonderbound this spooky season than with Boulder band The Widow’s Bane. While the promo material calls them a “zombie death polka band,” I was thinking of Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen with maybe a bit of klezmer mixed in while thoroughly enjoyed their backing performance in a media preview Wednesday night.

Originally staged in 2018, the Wicked Bayou story is based on a song by the band’s frontman Clay Rose (also known by his stage name Gov. Mortimer Leech) — with additional story credit to Cohen Rose. It’s a tale of two young lovers playing in the bayou who are soon set upon by dark forces led by a puppet master named Mr. Stitches (Aidan O’Leary). (The boy and girl — Seraphine and Armand —are played alternately by Danielle Lieberman and Jocelyn Green and Nathan Mariano and Richard Romero on different dates.)

Read Toni Tresca’s preview of this show in Westword.

The show opens with Leech in the spotlight wearing fright makeup and a battered top hat strumming his guitar and singing “Child’s Play.” He fades back to a riser up left with the rest of the band — drummer, keyboardist, accordionist and horn player — while we meet Seraphine and Armand. In Wonderbound’s newly renovated space, there’s plenty of room for the dancers to spread out — and the smooth dance floor allows for a lot of sliding to be incorporated into the motion.

The choreography by Wonderbound co-founder Garrett Ammon is a high energy mix of ballet paired with a variety of moving poses that at times veer between tumbling and contortionism. I was particularly struck by the many instances of the dancers’ bodies becoming intertwined — using gravity and their own momentum to power stunningly fluid movements. The bayou tale contains a great many scenes — each accompanied by a different Widow’s Bane song — and the dance numbers flow between those for just a few players to those for the full company. All of them are visually arresting and eerily evocative of the forces and characters present in this wicked bayou. Even if you don’t completely understand what’s happening at any given moment, the skill of the dancers and the beautiful choreography tell as much of the story as you need to know.

(That said, it’s well worth looking at the scene synopsis in the program before the show starts for an idea of what’s to come.)

Morgan Sicklick as the bruja | Photo: Martha Wirth

As the Governor growls through his songs accompanied by the dance, we’re transported from the initial innocence of the two lovers to an increasingly dark place where a bruja — a type of sorcerer — is scheming to use Mr. Stitches for her own evil purposes. The bruja is played by Morgan Sicklick, and the scenes between here and O’Leary contain some of the most arresting moments in the performance as the song and dance depict a demonic servant-master relationship. Wicked Bayou is not a lighthearted Halloween confection; it’s the real deal with zombie puppets, chains, cages, death and a human-eating alligator on the loose in the form of a huge puppet handled by a half-dozen dancers.

Alongside some well-done projections, there are also old-school stage tricks like the use of giant scarves to depict roiling water during a dramatic storm scene that ends Act 1. Spot-on lighting design by Karalyn Star Pytel is necessarily dark, but full of shades and shadows and enough illumination to see the faces and bodies as they move through the scenes. The costume design by Ashley O’Brien is topnotch and ranges from the simple clothes worn by the boy and girl to the bruja’s flamenco-inspired ensemble of gold, red and black.

The teaming of Wonderbound with The Widow’s Bane More is a match made in heaven hell — a perfect pairing of music and dance that clicks on every level and is a great entrée to this style of contemporary ballet Wonderbound excels at.