The Tiger Lillies are heading to Bogota with their show Edgar Allan Poe’s Haunted Palace, a highly visual nightmare and bizarre musical extravaganza, The Tiger Lillies plunge into the dark and sinister world of Edgar Allan Poe.
The international creative team behind this darkly comic musical spectacle consists of French-American director Paul Golub, American video designer Mark Holthusen (also collaborator on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) and Swedish playwright Peder Bjurman, (also known from his work with Robert Lepage). The theatrical score and all songs are new compositions by Martyn Jacques, lead singer of The Tiger Lillies.
Loosely based on Poe’s stories and poems, equally inspired by his tumultuous and tragic life, the show retains the author’s very own dark sense of humour as we journey through the inner paths of his sordid soul.
Set in the Haunted Palace, it tells the story of a starving young poet who encounters the Raven. The devilish Raven offers to sell him a darker kind of ink that will allow the poet to write himself to fame and glory. Writing feverishly, he soon runs out of ink, and desperate for more, he is forced to pawn his own head.
Searching desperately for his head, the poet rushes through the many corridors and rooms of the Haunted Palace. Each room is a story, a poem, an aspect of Poe’s imagination and, everywhere, are the dying maidens, who one by one disappear or die in his arms.
Devastated, he is pulled down by his self-induced vortex, ending half dead in the muddy streets of Baltimore.
The set consists of a multifunctional magic box. Projections and set pieces weave together to create a constantly changing theatrical illusion. In a split second we are transported from the trompe l’oeil castle corridors of the Haunted Palace to a squalid poet’s den, from a dodgy back alley to a storybook kingdom by the sea, all these different locales framed by a classical 19th century anatomical theatre.
25-26 August
Teatro Colon, Bogota