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Alice Cooper Recruits Broadway Director For Theatre of Death

The new Alice Cooper Show 'Theatre of Death' is a whole new act for Alice. Broadway director Robert Roth put it together.

“He did Beauty And The Beast on Broadway and he worked with Elton John on Lestat, the vampire Lestat on Broadway. That’s what he does. He is a Broadway director,” Alice tells Undercover News.

Alice approached Robert for a new way of doing his show. “I kind of said I have my own way of doing things and I want a fresh approach to the Alice Cooper Show for this show,” he says. “I said I’m going to give you the songs and let you pick the songs and let me know the idea of what you come up with. So he did it the way he would do it and I like the idea that it is going to throw people off guard who think they have Alice figured out”.

Alice had total faith in Roth because Roth was an Alice Cooper fan. “He knows. He is a fan on top of everything else. He is an Alice fan. He totally gets it,” Alice says. “He understands that “Eighteen” and ‘School’s Out’ and ‘Billion Dollar Babies’ have got to be in the show. But then you try to figure out a new way to do these songs on stage which is going to be a new way of doing it which is going to be a visual treat that keeps within the Alice image, that makes people go “Ohh” and “Ahh”. That is really the fun part of it. But it was three weeks of 10 hours a day of rehearsals to put this show together”.

To make this show, Roth was given licence to adjust the songs. “You had to cut this verse out of that song because the timing was wrong. You had to make this song a little bit longer to accommodate this set change. It took a lot of work,” he says.

The show is not a complete retro show. It does include some of the newer songs but also a lot of old surprises. “We do a couple of things off Along Came A Spider,” he says. “We don’t do all oldies. I think the audience expects to hear the standards but I like to throw in songs they aren’t expecting. Songs we haven’t done in 25 or 30 years. The real fans go crazy when they hear those things. I wanted to do at least two songs off the new album. You have to allow for that too”.

Alice is currently on tour across Australia.

The setlist for the show is:

School's Out (part only) / Department of Youth / Eighteen / Wicked Young Man / Ballad of Dwight Fry / Go To Hell / Guilty / Welcome To My Nightmare / Cold Ethyl / Poison / The Awakening / From The Inside (w/ extended instrumental) / Nurse Rozetta / Is It My Body / Be My Lover / Only Women Bleed / I Never Cry / The Black Widow (Instrumental) / Vengeance Is Mine / Devil's Food / Dirty Diamonds / Billion Dollar Babies / Killer / I Love The Dead (excerpt) / No More Mr. Nice Guy / Under My Wheels / Schools Out (full version)

(Originally appeared on the Australian Undercover website, on the 22nd August 2009.)