Some stories refuse to stay buried. At Glendale’s Nocturne Theatre, that sentiment is about to become quite literal.
Opening Friday, September 11th, Frankenstein: Resurrection isn’t another retelling of Mary Shelley’s oft-adapted classic, but an original musical sequel that turns Victor Frankenstein’s infamous experiment back on him. Resurrected beneath the Paris Morgue by the brilliant and obsessive Dr. Seraphina Pretorius, Victor becomes convinced that her sister, Elsa, is the reincarnation of his lost Elizabeth, pulling him into a new journey shaped by grief, obsession and the consequences of refusing to let go.
It’s fitting territory for the Nocturne, which has developed a distinctive theatrical identity by pairing familiar stories with bold staging while making room for original work. Madam Scrooge: A Christmas Carol Musical, created by writer-lyricist Justin Meyer and composer Chris Thomas, has grown into an annual holiday production, while Meyer’s supernatural play The Eaves has added another homegrown work to the theater’s slate. And audiences have shown a willingness to return for the Nocturne’s distinctive takes on established material as well. Its acclaimed Dracula: The Musical proved popular enough to earn an extended run in 2025 before returning by popular demand this summer. The production also underscored how naturally Gothic storytelling fits the Nocturne’s intimate theater-in-the-round, where performers, movement and staging can surround an audience rather than remain at a comfortable distance.
Now, Meyer and Thomas are taking that Gothic sensibility into an original continuation of Frankenstein’s story that gives familiar characters entirely new ground to cover.
Ahead of the premiere, LAexcites spoke with Meyer about the influences behind the musical, his decision to continue rather than retell Victor’s story, the emotional questions driving the new narrative and what the Nocturne brings to its Gothic world.
What was it about Frankenstein that initially inspired you to create this musical, and what made you want to continue Victor’s story rather than simply retell Mary Shelley’s original?
Meyer: I’ve always loved Frankenstein, both Mary Shelley’s novel and all of the different ways those characters have been reinvented through film. I grew up loving the Universal Monsters, and Bride of Frankenstein in particular was a huge influence on this show. There’s also a lot of Hammer horror in its DNA — The Curse of Frankenstein — and even something as outrageous as Flesh for Frankenstein. I love that entire lineage of Gothic horror, from something beautiful and atmospheric to something completely over-the-top and grotesque.
But Frankenstein has been retold so many times that Chris Thomas and I weren’t particularly interested in doing another adaptation of the novel. We thought it would be much more exciting to treat Shelley’s story as history and ask, ‘What happened next?’ What if Victor Frankenstein were resurrected more than a hundred years later? What if the Creature had survived all that time? And most importantly, what happens when Victor is given the thing almost nobody gets — a second chance?
That gave us permission to take all of these characters and themes that people already know and build an entirely new Gothic mythology around them. The show can reference Shelley and the movies we love without being beholden to simply recreating either one. Even the opening establishes that we’re beginning after the familiar tragedy: Victor is dead, the Creature has survived, Elizabeth is gone — and yet Victor’s obsession has somehow survived death itself.
The show ultimately asks whether Victor, rather than the Creature he brought to life, may have been the true monster all along. How did that idea shape the story you wanted to tell, and do you hope audiences leave seeing Victor differently?
Meyer: Absolutely. One of the things I find fascinating about Frankenstein is that the older you get, the more complicated the word ‘monster’ becomes. The Creature certainly does monstrous things, but Victor creates life and then rejects it. There’s an argument that Victor sets everything that follows into motion.
So in Resurrection, we flip their journeys. The Creature has had more than a century to live with what happened. He’s still damaged and frightening, but he has developed compassion. When Victor returns, the Creature actually becomes his guide — almost his Virgil — forcing him to confront the people who died because of their shared history: William, Justine, Henry, Alphonse and Elizabeth.
Victor, on the other hand, gets a second chance and gradually begins making the same choices again. That’s the tragedy. He thinks he’s motivated by love, but love without acceptance becomes possession.
I don’t necessarily want audiences to leave saying, ‘Victor was evil.’ I think that’s less interesting. I want them debating when love became obsession, when ambition became entitlement, and at what point Victor stopped seeing the people around him as people and started seeing them as things he had the right to remake.
Grief and an inability to let go seem to drive much of Frankenstein: Resurrection, particularly as Victor becomes convinced that Elsa is his lost Elizabeth. What interested you about exploring how grief and lost love can turn into obsession?
Meyer: I think grief is actually the engine underneath almost every resurrection story. Why do we want to bring somebody back? Because accepting that they’re gone is unbearable.
What interested me was taking something completely understandable — Victor still loving Elizabeth — and slowly pushing it into something frightening. When he begins seeing and hearing pieces of Elizabeth in Elsa, he convinces himself that this must mean something.
But the important question becomes: even if some part of Elizabeth exists inside Elsa, does that make Elsa Elizabeth?
Victor eventually stops asking that question because he desperately needs the answer to be yes. That’s where grief has become obsession. He’s no longer trying to understand Elsa; he’s trying to transform her into the person he wants her to be.
And Elsa became increasingly important to me as we developed the show because she’s surrounded by people deciding what her life should be, while she’s desperately trying to figure out what she wants.
So beneath all of the lightning, corpses and mad science, I think the story became very much about the danger of loving an idea of someone more than the actual person standing in front of you.
For audiences who may know Frankenstein mostly through movies and popular culture, what do you hope they discover about this story, and how does bringing it to life at the Nocturne — an ideal setting for this Gothic world — help shape that experience?
Meyer: I hope they discover that Frankenstein is much stranger, sadder and more morally complicated than just a scientist, a laboratory and a monster with bolts in his neck. Those iconic images are wonderful — and we’re absolutely playing with the visual vocabulary audiences associate with Frankenstein — but underneath all of that is a story about creation, abandonment, loneliness, mortality and responsibility.
At the same time, we’re not afraid to have fun with the genre. This is a big Gothic horror-fantasy musical. There are corpses, homunculi, electrical experiments, the Paris Morgue, the Arctic, ghosts, the Nine Circles of Hell and some very heightened Grand Guignol horror. The real Paris Morgue becomes almost a carnival attraction in our world — the show actually calls it a ‘Theatre of Death’ — which lets us play with that collision between death and entertainment.
Musically, Chris and I also didn’t want this to sound like a museum piece. There are influences from classic musical theatre, but also Danny Elfman, Tim Burton’s dark fantasy worlds, Edward Scissorhands, Rocky Horror and even the scale and theatricality of Queen. The score is modern, effects-heavy and sometimes enormous. We wanted the music to feel like another resurrection — taking the DNA of Gothic horror and running electricity through it.
And the Nocturne is such a perfect home for that because the building already feels theatrical and slightly otherworldly. We can surround the audience with this world rather than putting Gothic horror politely behind a proscenium. It allows the production to feel somewhere between a musical, an old horror film and a live nightmare.
You’ve approached theater from several directions as a writer, director and performer. What has been most personally rewarding about bringing Frankenstein: Resurrection to life, and will audiences also see you performing in the show?
Meyer: They will — I’m playing Victor Frankenstein, which is either very convenient casting or an absolutely terrible idea for someone who also wrote and is directing the show!
But strangely, performing Victor hasn’t been the most rewarding part for me. The biggest challenge — and ultimately the most rewarding part — has been creating an entirely new story from scratch. I probably went through seven different treatments of Frankenstein: Resurrection before arriving at this version. Characters changed, motivations changed, entire storylines disappeared.
The biggest discovery was Elsa. Early on, I thought Victor was unquestionably the center of the story. Through rewriting, I realized that Victor is really the catalyst. Elsa increasingly became its emotional center and, in many ways, its driving force. The story begins asking what Victor is going to do, but eventually the more important question becomes what happens to Elsa when everyone around her believes they have some claim over who she is or who she should become.
And none of that development happens in a vacuum. When you’re creating a new musical, you need actors and collaborators who are willing to live inside something that’s still changing. This cast has been incredibly patient with that process. Their questions, opinions and even their confusion have helped expose plot holes and forced me to make these characters more than two-dimensional Frankenstein archetypes.
That’s probably been the most rewarding thing: watching something that existed as seven different versions in my head finally become a world that belongs to an entire company. And then, somehow, I have to put on Victor’s costume and walk into the middle of the monster I created — which, considering the subject matter, feels strangely appropriate.
Cover image caption: Writer-director Justin Meyer, who also stars as Victor Frankenstein in Frankenstein: Resurrection, brings his original Gothic musical to Glendale’s Nocturne Theatre from Sept. 11–30. Images courtesy of the Nocturne Theatre and Justin Meyer.
Frankenstein: Resurrection runs Friday, September 11th through Wednesday, September 30th at the Nocturne Theatre at 324 N. Orange St. in Glendale. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit thenocturnetheatre.com.
