Damon Pitcher in Zombies, Inc., Live & In Color at Edmonton Fringe 2025. Photo supplied.
Zombies, Inc. (Stage 29, Strathcona High School)
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
There’s a certain crazy, irresistible improbability about Zombies, Inc.. And it’s not the zombies.
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Start with the hook of this startlingly accomplished new solo musical comedy (a solo musical? an intriguing challenge in itself) from Marcus Perkins Bejarano and Kim Jinhyoung, directed by Devanand Jani (With Bells On). Zombies, as we know, tend to be inveterate upstagers. And here we have a musical that includes zombies and a raging zombie apocalypse in progress in NYC , yes, but isn’t really about zombies and the rampage of the undead. Which is already a level of amusing complexity you can’t just run around the Fringe expecting to find.
It’s told, and sung, while it’s happening, by one beleaguered hustler of a jewellery salesman stuck in 30 Rockefeller Plaza (“yes, 30 Rock,” Ray rolls his eyes). Ray is trapped — by flesh-eating zombie hordes, yes, but also by his own life as an aspirational capitalist success story.
In a way that might remind you a bit of the movie Shaun of the Dead, poor Ray, late of Taco Bell and now of Shiny Things Jewellery, comes to realize, one de-fleshed dream after another, that he’s been living like a zombie anyway, in a life built on the rickety upward mobility architecture the American Dream. Work hard, work even harder, make more money, get promoted, sell more diamonds … and you’ll win.
As Ray, a hapless, increasingly desperate go-getter of a guy, forever on speed dial, Edmonton’s Damon Pitcher is sensational. His perplexity, the way his swagger turns to ruefulness on a dime, make Ray the kind of shlepper hero you can’t help but like. And Pitcher has a big, agile, adaptable musical theatre voice that takes with ease to a whole assortment of pop, rock, patter songs. The score is full of clever musical theatre riffs with unexpected angles and jagged intervals. I was especially fond of the funny romantic ballad Undying Love.
“I’m a diamond in the rough,” as Ray sings, hopefully, early in his, er, meteoric rise from making churros to pitching diamond sales to the polyamorous (more chances for engagement rings), and the Holy Unifier Cult. The spirit of showbiz lives in the guy as he recounts how he met his wife, how she left him with the wounding words”I feel like I’ve been married to a zombie”), how his rise to full partner at Shiny Things just never seems to happen….
Sassy, smart, and funny.
