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Review: The Intergalactic Nemesis at The Long Center
It's 1930 something. After brassy reporter Molly Sloane and her sidekick Timmy Mendez escape death at the hands of shadowy assassins in Eastern Europe, they investigate an exhibition at the castle of the world-class mesmerist, Mysterion the Magnificent. When Mysterion enslaves the minds of his audience, a librarian from Flagstaff saves Molly and Timmy. Slowly, our heroes uncover a plot between Mysterion and the goopy inhabitants of the planet Zygon to conquer the human race.
You already love The Intergalactic Nemesis. So did we.
Last Friday and Saturday, the Long Center hosted Jason Neulander’s pitch-perfect homage to sci-fi pulp and Weird Tales-inspired radio dramas. In 1996, Neulander and Ray Colgan assembled a small team of writers to slap together short radio serial drama scripts to be performed and recorded at Little City coffeehouse over a number of weeks. The show officially became a bona fide serialized radio drama when KUT started airing recordings of the show on Sunday mornings. Then in 2000, the Nemesis crew crammed the full plot into one evening and started running the show at the Salvage Vanguard Theater. In 2004, the show did a national tour, and in 2010 Neulander’s friend, Cliff Redd, encouraged him to blow up the show to Dell Hall-size. We’re glad they did, it was totally nuts and a ton of fun.
Nemesis calls itself a live-action graphic novel, which isn’t exactly right. There exists a graphic novel of the show, illustrated by artist Tim Doyle, but the live show is a radio drama with projected pictures instead of narration. This caused some dizziness on stage, because the excellent voice actors started competing (and winning) with the wonderful and hilarious artwork from the graphic novel. Previous incarnations of Nemesis had a narrator, but that wasn't going to fill this space.
Actors Shana Merlin and Mical Trejo deftly handled the challenge of occasionally talking to themselves as different characters. And although the scipt's primary weapon is camp (and plenty of it), Chris Gibson somehow still managed to nail the emotional arc of a widower librarian from the future. The show’s foley artist, Buzz Moran, and score composer Graham Reynolds lent the show some real radio drama authenticity and had their share of punchlines.
If you missed the too-short engagement at Dell Hall, don’t worry! Before the show began, Neulander announced that The Intergalactic Nemesis has become an official selection for Fantastic Fest, so there should be a chance to catch another performance (although the details will apparently be in the next wave of Fantastic Fest announcements). Do not miss it; considering that there really isn’t a roadmap for this kind of performance, the crew for Nemesis is pulling it all off insanely well.
