The Dead Shall Rise…on Their Toes

They’re b-a-a-a-a-ck.

The great thing about the undead — or the not-so-great-thing about them, depending upon your POV — is that they keep coming back.

After a two-year interment, just in time for Dia de los Muertos and Halloween, “Sweet Sorrow®, A Zombie Ballet” returns to the stage. The work is an original creation of the Leigh Purtill Ballet Company, “live” — you should pardon the expression — for one weekend only, and available on streaming on EventBrite through November 10.

Romantics say that love never dies. The rest of us know otherwise. But along these lines, “Sweet Sorrow®, A Zombie Ballet” is the continued story of Romeo and Juliet after the doomed lovers have left this mortal coil — in other words, offed themselves. 

In this sequel, the star-crossed teens find themselves in a shadowy netherworld populated by vampires, mourners, lost souls, spiders, snakes, werewolves, dragonflies, Medusa, witches, a Raven Queen and her Corvidae, and other afterlife-of-the-party guests. Grieving cousins Rosaline and Benvolio add another dimension to the story by stealing a mystical elixir that admits them into the “thin place,” incidentally observed by myriad pre-Christian cultures worldwide between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice (namely right now), between the quick and the dead.

The classic tragedy may seem dark enough. But company founder, artistic director and choreographer Leigh Purtill, who first conceived this project her yet-to-be-published novel, added more when the show made its debut back in 2017. More darkness, but also more goofiness.

Make that a LOT more. 

Purtill is fond of saying that ballet takes itself far too seriously. Her company’s win on the 2017 broadcast of “The Gong Show” is enshrined with glee on her Web site. 

Might she say the same of Shakespeare?

This production, billed as LA’s only Zombie Ballet, in the form of three distinct points of view, goes far beyond the balcony scene into creepy, kooky places that bring to mind the gallows-humor of Charles Addams and Gahan Wilson, as well as the high camp of horror films, especially “Shaun of the Dead.”

When we asked Glendale resident Purtill if she had grown up with a troubled, Wednesday Addams-sort of gloomy identity, her explosive laugh says it all. “No, no way!” she says, although she does harbor a love for death-metal and Yngwie Malmstein. “I was a cheerleader! I was on the tennis team.”

One major takeaway: her grandmother was a tennis pro who told Leigh when she was a young girl, “Don’t ever let a man win. If you can beat him, beat him.” Not surprisingly, strong female leads are on fierce display in Purtill’s work.

“The dark side of romance often feels linked to the woman scorned, or the young lover of any gender scorned,” Purtill says. “We all make immature decisions when we’re very young. This feeling is really present today in our youth-worshiping culture. No bad choice could be more rash than ending our lives over unrequited love, as Romeo and Juliet did. But we tend to hold that up as a romantic ideal. That’s the real tragedy of Romeo and Juliet —that they did not live long enough to experience mature, adult love.”

DEETS

• Sweet Sorrow®: A Zombie Ballet by Leigh Purtill
• @leighpurtillballetcompany
• Onstage:
  • Saturday, October 19, 7:00 PM
  • Sunday, October 20, 4:00 PM
• Lanterman Auditorium
• 4491 Cornishon Avenue, La Cañada/Flintridge
• Tickets & Streaming: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sweet-sorrow-a-zombie-ballet-tickets-952037418547?aff=ebdssbdestsearch