A Musical About Mary Shelley & Her Gang
Here we go. Seth comes over and listens to “Vulkano” and is impressed with the orchestration by Sean and Peter Fox. Exactly what he is ready for musically, Seth says to Sean. A week later he is in North Park for the day, and he and Sean and Sandy pound out “Arctic,” a snippet of which is here:
We will all get familiar with the Frankenstein novel, which is rarely presented as Mary Shelley wrote it, and we will learn a ton about Percy Shelley and Lord Byron and the turbulent times of revolt and revelation they lived in. There is a matron saint, if she can be called that, in the form of Mary’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft, the first feminist author who wrote about motherhood so evocatively. What a character she is! Throw in Aaron Burr, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Charles Darwin, and London’s Regency period and you have a story worth telling.
But it’s the actual novel “Frankentein” that will serve as the building block to tell our version of an unknown manuscript discovered in a Barclays Bank vault in London in 1977, more than 150 years after it was written. In this third revision of her story, Mary Shelley gives birth to a fearsome character, the wife that the monster begs Dr. Frankenstein to create. The wife, named Lilith, turns out to be much more than the monster or the scientist can handle. She sets her sights on the royal households of Europe in a murderous rampage that is funny, erotic and savagely brutal. Here’s a monster we can admire!
Pages from Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’
“. . . a murderous rampage that is funny, erotic and savagely brutal.””
“a new romance of a peculiar interest”