Imagine your favorite science fiction comic book characters coming to life on a large screen, in color and with voices and sound effects. This seemingly far-fetched idea is a reality today…if by today we mean Saturday, January 21 at 8 p.m. at the Belding Theater in Hartford, part of the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts.
Turn back your imaginary time clocks to 1933 and experience “The Intergalactic Nemesis,” billed as a science fiction period piece, stuffed with romance, horror and suspense. Travel along with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Molly Sloan, her intrepid sidekick assistant Timmy and a mysterious librarian Ben as they race to save the world. Sludge monsters from the planet Zygon are set to invade and this unlikely trio of heroes is all that is posed to stop them.
Listen and feast your eyes as the giant screen is enhanced by three live actors, a Foley artist making the sound effects resonate and a keyboardist adding appropriately spooky music. Over 1000 hand-drawn comic book images will barrel and blast you to intergalactic nirvana, LIVE.
For tickets ($28-38), call the Bushnell, 166 Capitol Avenue, Hartford at 860-987-5900 or online at www.bushnell.org.
Chris Gibson gets to play hero and villain and a whole lot of the characters in between and it’s “great fun.” When he moved from Orlando, Florida to Austin, Texas, he had to reestablish his acting career credentials all over again. He began by volunteering to mow the lawn at a local theater company and thus won his first audition, definitely through the tool shed door.
Gibson credits Jason Neulander, a producer and sometimes actor, with the idea for “The Intergalactic Nemesis,” and says it was fourteen years in the making. It began as a radio drama and has mushroomed into the version that will grace the Belding Theater this weekend. The drama will continue in trilogy form and the second sequel will debut in late spring or early summer.
This “live graphic theater,” says Gibson, is unlike anything else, combining the three art forms of comic book art, radio drama and music.” It is all computerized, all memorized, with gorgeous art work. For example, when the characters jump on the train, a box of macaroni and cheese is utilized to mimic the wheels hitting the tracks.
Inspired by “Star Wars” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” it appeals to comic book fans, science fiction lovers and followers of radio drama. As for Chris Gibson, “I’m having the time of my life.” Hopefully he doesn’t have to mow the lawn any more.
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