Take equal doses of Transylvanian folklore, Goethe, Faust, Ibsen, Dante, booming Werner Herzog like voice overs, stock footage movie moments projected on a supposed magic mirror, club dance moves, electronic beats, roller blades, circus arts, daddy dom issues, notions of sin and redemption, and overt sexuality. Now toss it all in a blender, hit frappe again and again, and once properly mixed, hurl the resulting concoction all over a black box stage. This will give you an approximation of the gloriously spectacular, misguided avant-garde, multimedia, passion project being served up at the Davenport Theatre.
Let us begin at the beginning of this torrid tale. Wicked Clone is the story of two identical twin sisters born in Transylvania in 1483 to Vlad the Impaler himself. Mihaela and Gabriela are opposite acorns not falling far from the same blood-thirsty tree. Mihaela is the somewhat good girl who questions her existence and is always in search of love. Gabriela is the totally bad girl that always seeks vengeance and is constantly jealous of her sister’s ambitions. Both being undead daddy’s girls they can’t help but do battle with each other.
Mihaela flees from Transylvania to 2018 New York and pulls her fangs out in order to find love and become a human. She then writes a book and mounts a Broadway show based on her life and writings. Twin sister Gabriela also follows Mihaela through space and time to return her sister to her vampiric roots and back under now actually dead daddy’s demonic control. Mihaela falls in love with a human poet who, in the midst of being killed by Gabriela, manages to bite Mihaela which turns her human. That doesn’t stick though, since no plot point lingers in this story, so her fangs start to grow back and soon enough both sisters are at each other’s throats again. If this all sounds like a confused and convoluted mess it’s because that’s exactly what this is.
Wicked Clone is performed, choreographed, scored, designed, and teched by Transylvanian born American artists Mihaela and Gabriela Modorcea. Mihaela wrote the novel, Wicked Clone or How to Deal with the Evil on which her script for the show is based. Both sisters traveled to America and ended up creating Wicked Clone as a production to showcase their many skills and find fame and fortune on the Great White Way. If this all sounds familiar that’s because it is indeed all too familiar. In an extreme case of life imitating art, these multi-talented identical twin sisters have birthed what they call a cinema musical, which they believe is a new genre that projects the audience into an immersive blend of theater and film projection.
According to the program Wicked Clone was directed by God. If true the Creator has much to answer for as far as his, or her, theatrical choices are concerned. The music is the stuff of dance floor fodder, but as a musical there’s not a hummable memorable tune in the entire lot of nineteen original pop-gypsy compositions imbedded in the drama. The sisters Modorcea are not without talent. They can sing. They can dance. They can write pop happy electronic dance music. They also managed to mount what is an ambitious production. Their faith in themselves to create something artistically grand is heroic and an argument can be made here for experimental theatre reminiscent of the Warhol crowd. The shear audaciousness of the thing makes one want the sisters Modorcea to succeed at their attempt to create dark cinema theatre magic, but there are a mountain of obstacles rising against them and many are self-perpetuated.
Davenport Theatre 354 West 45th St New York, NY 10039 www.wickedclone.com 212.956.0948 $69 March 8 – May 27, 2018
From an original post on TheaterScene.