Bozeman Actors Theatre continues to present its production of Sam Shepard’s Tooth of Crime to regional audiences. Shows begin promptly at 7:30pm on Friday and Saturday evenings through December 8th at the Eagles Lodge Ballroom, located at 316 E Main downtown.
Shepard, the great playwright who passed away in 2017, built a career as the voice of the lonely American West. But the haunted landscape in Tooth of Crime is like no other he ever created. This America has gone off the rails long ago. What’s left is a poetic cross of the traditional Western film, complete with its high-noon gunfighter showdown, and a nihilistic Sex Pistols concert. Music and violent verse fly like bullets, and no one is left unscathed.
Told over several musical numbers and intense bursts of dialogue, Tooth of Crime is a thrilling rock-and-roll epic of power and fame. In a celebrity-obsessed America, an aging rock idol named Hoss, played by Mark Kuntz, and his ragtag entourage struggle desperately to stay on top with challengers at every turn. When an upstart rival known as Crow, played by Tonya Andrews, comes on the scene breaking all the rules, only one can emerge the victor in a duel to the death – a duel where words and music have become the weapons of choice.
Shepard wrote the play in 1972 but revised it for a complete reboot that premiered in Greenwich Village in 1996. That version, featuring a score by T Bone Burnett, will be performed live in the Gordon Carpenter-directed production by The Keepers, a rock band under the musical direction of Lee Dickerson. The cast of BAT veterans includes Kuntz (The Realistic Joneses), Andrews (Copenhagen), Will Dickerson (Fool for Love), Sydney Madill (Life of Galileo), and Claire McGinty (The Realistic Joneses).
Tooth of Crime tickets are $20 for general admission or $10 for students (with ID) and are available in advance at www.bozemanactorstheatre.org/tickets or at the door. All ages welcome, but parental guidance is suggested (profanity, drug use, and stage violence).
Tooth of Crime is the second play in Bozeman Actors Theatre’s 2018-19 season, its 10th, dedicated to its late co-founder Dee Dee Van Zyl, who passed away earlier this year.