Photo Flash: Buck Creek Players Present Frankenstein: A New Musical

When grown, Victor seeks to further his study of the sciences at the University at Ingolstadt, Germany, but vows to one day return to Elizabeth to fulfill the promise of a life together. At the University, Victor endeavors to create life where there was none--to reanimate the dead.

For many months, Victor toils in a clandestine laboratory to create what he hopes will be the perfect human--a giant, fashioned from the body of an executed criminal and other limbs and organs purloined from gallows and graveyards. One November night, he harnesses the awesome force of an electrical storm to breathe life into his creation. But when his creature (Dante J.L. Murray) comes to life, it is not as the perfect human he envisioned, but as a hideous beast.

Thus unfurls the timeless, cautionary tale of Victor Frankenstein, whose noble dreams of grandeur unleash instead a litany of terror and tragedy. Before it is done, everything in his privileged world will be torn asunder, as Victor and his creature are pit against one another in an epic and deadly war of wills that will lead them across the continent and ultimately to the ends of the earth.

A story of life, love, Promethean dreams and Faustian horror, Frankenstein explores the full gamut of human experience like no other novel ever written. Forget all you have seen in the movies--this is not a Hollywood scarefest populated by lumbering ghouls and wild-eyed maniacs. This is Mary Shelley's original, brilliant, romantic terror -- a dark vision of what lies at the depths of the human soul and what happens when its full power is unleashed.

Photos by Aaron B. Bailey