Frankenstein

From "Frankenstein's Bride," a new musical from Seth Flynn, Sandra Bishop and Seanie Blue, based on Blue's re-write of Mary Shelley's classic horror tale. The song is from the opening of the play, where Mary's Monster laments that he is doomed to a life of murder unless Doctor Frankenstein can make him a wife to love and caress.

Dancer and writer Caitie Belle Yevoli embodies the teenage Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein in 1816. The novel was the first of its kind for the young woman, whose singular genetic make-up attracted a married poet named Percy Shelley with whom she absconded to war-torn Europe to spark the zentih of the Romantics, the first mixing of literary pretenders with the new facts of science.

Already mired in five musicals in varying states of completion, Sean has mulled over the possibility of turning his novel about the Shelleys and Lord Byron in Switzerland into a musical that tells not just the genesis of Frankenstein but the sexual and libertine politics of the Romantics as they lurched from one tragedy to another. With his longtime creative partner Sandy Bishop, Sean recruited the frontman of Washington’s most versatile band, Seth Flynn of the Duskwhales, and the trio rattled off ten songs in 12 quick recording sessions before the pandemic hit.

“I didn’t like the way Frankenstein ends, so I re-wrote it,” says Sean, casually, “And I made sure that Mary Shelley’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft was better represented in my re-telling of the monster’s story, because Wollstonecraft had the right idea: kings and queens in particular and aristocrats in general need to be taken out, by whatever means necessary.”

Blue as Dr. Frankenstein . . . or as his Monster?