The Birds

Tonight I saw a cool performance of The Birds as part of "Attack of the Killer B-Movies" at The Dark Room Theater.

Having never seen the original Hitchcock film, I probably am unqualified to review this. But instead I'll just review it from the perspective of someone who had never seen the film. The result being: it was awesome!

As you know, we debated how they would handle "the birds" themselves. To the joy of the audience, they used a variety of amazing techniques. The gull attack on the boat was a fake bird on a string. The birds flying in through the chimney was done with video projection and actors flailing. Some birds were done with flashlights and cutouts, other birds were never shown but just pointed at and described. The phone booth scene was done amazingly by Josh Lenn (my friend in the show) who used his hands to create birds and slam them into the non-existent glass. But my absolute favorite creative way they handled the birds was an opening scene in a pet shop, where actors held metal grates in front of their faces and used their own heads to be the birds. They would whistle and look this way and that, it was surprisingly effective and amazing.

Anyway, the show found a perfect balance of scaring us and making us laugh, all the while not taking itself too seriously and making great use of the tiny space they had for performing.

I also loved all the references to Bodega Bay and I'm so glad our own trip out there gave us a taste for the desolation and fear captured in this story. "You know what makes this fog so scary... ten minutes ago it was floating over the pitch dark Pacific Ocean."