DRAG ME TO HELL

The idea of staging a rock musical had been kicking around the head of Wolfgang vocalist Basti Artadi for years, possibly decades.

- SCOTT GARCEAU

SCOTT GARCEAU

It was while working with director Nelsito Gomez, though, that a concept started taking shape and flesh: Basti and Nelsito realized a lot of the singer's lyrics resembled a much older story, that of Goethe's ill-fated Faust. You know: the guy who sells his soul to Mephistopheles, and gets dragged down to hell.

So they stitched together a story based on Wolfgang's songs. “Basti let me go first, I made the initial plot,” says Gomez of the collaboration after the curtain closes at Doreen Black Box Theater, Areté, Ateneo University. “We had to agree which Faust to do, so we decided on the Goethe version — it’s been turned into an opera before, done in so many versions. But the one that came closest to our spines was the F.W. Murnau Faust,” a silent expressionist film. You can see it in the opera-like staging, the deep black eyeliner and somewhat overwrought gestures. There’s also the lack of a libretto: just the lyrics threaded together tell the story. “That's where the text comes out, the aftereffects. German expressionism was kind of our base.”