Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre's 20th CenturyThe World/Inferno Friendship Society & Jay Scheib, An Arktype Project - Canadian Premiere

Join the mosh pit! Never before seen in Canada, this multimedia punk-rock spectacle shows us life through the eyes of one of the cinema's most sinister stars.

Visionary young director Jay Scheib, whose This Place Is a Desert sold out at New York's Under the Radar festival last year, teams up with Brooklyn cabaret punk band World/Inferno Friendship Society to investigate the enigma that was Peter Lorre: a Hollywood star who remained a perennial outsider.

From Fritz Lang's M in 1931 to Roger Corman's 1963 horrorcomedy The Raven, the Hungarian-born Lorre gave cinema some of its most memorably sinister characters. His private life, too, had its dark side: a morphine addiction that bedevilled him at the height of his career. Recreating key motion picture sequences mixed with live interactive video, this spectacular multimedia punk operetta paints a vivid portrait of Lorre both as an individual and as an archetype of 20th-century alienation.

"A cross between the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Cabaret, the Moth, an episode of Biography and a bruising 1979 gig by The Clash... a phenomenon."- FORBES.com

This project was created with a commission and residency from Peak Performances @ Montclair, Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, Jedediah Wheeler, Executive Director and was partially developed through a space grant from LaGuardia Performing Arts Center's LPAC Lab Program.