As you can imagine, for Slater there’s a lot of jetting back and forth these days between Los Angeles, New York and London. Then there’s life at home, where a little magic continues to brew with Beatsville, which I (along with a few other fortunate attendees) was able to catch a glimpse of at the National Alliance for Musical Theater (NAMT) new-works presentations this past October.
Beatsville is based on the Roger Corman cult film A Bucket of Blood. “As a script and as a film,” Slater says, “it’s very unformed. The characters aren’t really characters the way we think of them in theatrical terms-they’re more like placeholders in the narrative. But Wendy and I were attracted to the film precisely because it is short and not fully developed. We didn’t have to worry about dismantling a great film in order to resize it for the stage. For us the question was, ‘What do we need to add to make this a viable story?’ It was an idea in search of its final form.”