(Ed: The Head!!! That Wouldn’t DIE! is an original musical presented by Theater Artists Olympia which will be presented during Worldcon on Thursday evening. Prior to its Worldcon revival, it starts a two-week run at Lakewood Playhouse April 4-13, for which tickets are available. See it first in Lakewood and again during the con!)
The STORY!!! That Wouldn’t DIE!
Christian Carvajal
Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, specifically the year 1959 A.D., and a dark, country road near Burbank, California. Bill Cortner is an arrogant surgeon who’s developed promising if unorthodox organ transplantation techniques. He’s speeding toward his family’s country estate, his lovely fiancée, Jan, by his side, when he misses a turn. Bill is ejected from the convertible but lands on soft grass. Returning to the car, he finds it ablaze with Jan inside—decapitated by the wreck. Dazed by the accident, Bill wraps Jan’s head in his coat and staggers to the secret medical laboratory in the basement of the Cortner estate, where he revives Jan’s severed head in a tray of reanimating fluid. Our poor protagonist has become, in the immortal words of Mystery Science Theater 3000, “Jan in the Pan,” yet her macabre tribulations have only just begun. And just as Jan must survive a series of increasingly unlikely turns, the story of her misadventures would have a pretty wild ride of its own.
The story, developed by Rex Carlton and Joseph Green, was directed by Green as an 82-minute, black-and-white feature that the duo called The Black Door. In the decades since it was shot, however, it’s become clear that fans of unconventional sci-fi flicks care more about that movie than its financial backers ever did. It wasn’t released until 1962; even then, American International Pictures trimmed it to 71 minutes and released it on a drive-in double bill with Invasion of the Star Creatures, a notoriously awful sci-fi comedy in which invading aliens are played by actors in carrot costumes. AIP couldn’t even decide what to call the oddball horror movie: It was released as The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, The Head That Wouldn’t Die, sometimes both on the same print. The studio botched the copyright notice on its title card, so The Brain That Wouldn’t Die has been in the public domain since the moment it first saw daylight. You can literally watch the whole thing for free on its Wikipedia page.
Jan was played by Virginia Leith, a promising actor who’d already appeared in the Robert Wagner vehicle A Kiss Before Dying and Stanley Kubrick’s first feature, the self-financed Fear and Desire. But in the three years between shooting her role in The Black Door and its distribution, she got married, at which point she gave up acting till her divorce in 1968. She spent the 1970s and early ’80s playing guest roles on popular TV shows.
So how and why did this debacle of a movie inspire not one, not two, but four different stage musicals? Its inclusion on MST3K probably helped, as did the fact that it can legitimately lay claim to being one of the first gore-horror productions in cinema. Leith herself is worth watching as she gripes and schemes her way toward her Grand Guignol’s bizarrely triumphant conclusion.
Its first stage adaptation appeared in 2011, when The Brain That Wouldn’t Die! In 3D!!! premiered at the New York Musical Theater Festival. Unaware of that production, director pug Bujeaud (she prefers her first name be uncapitalized) was looking for fun, unconventional material to stage with Theater Artists Olympia, the company she helped launch and oversees as its artistic director. TAO had already produced Cannibal! The Musical and created a musical version of Night of the Living Dead when Bujeaud adapted Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood for the stage. Those shows were popular and profitable for the company, so the door to public domain material was wide open. As Bujeaud remembers it, “My daughter Sarah (Goodwin) called and said, ‘You have to look at this movie. I think it’s got potential.’ And I looked at it and thought, ‘Y’know, it sucks, but the bones are good. The basic premise is really interesting.’ And I got together with (comedian) Morgan (Picton) and (actor) Christian Doyle and said, ‘Let’s look at this and let’s try to put this together.’ And Christian dropped really fast. He said, ‘You can’t polish a turd.’ ‘Well, Mythbusters has proven that wrong. You can polish a turd.” (See episode 126, “End With a Bang.”) Picton wanted to make Doris, the model whose body Bill selects for Jan’s head, more maternal than Bujeaud envisioned her. “So Morgan said, ‘I think we’ve got a good start here. Why don’t you take it over from here?’” Bujeaud continues. “But the big thing left over from Morgan was he wrote the original draft of the monster’s song, ‘Abilene,’ which really informed what that monster became.” Because of course there’s a monster singing a folksy “I want” song in the Head That Wouldn’t Die musical. Why wouldn’t there be?
“We were all just running around like maniacs trying to put this thing together,” Bujeaud recalls. “I don’t spend a lot of time with musicals. I can’t write music, so I’m in the back room of my (day job) humming into my phone, writing lyrics and rewriting lyrics and re-re-rewriting lyrics. I’m still rewriting lyrics. We’re still working without a written score.”
The ragtag company debuted its Head musical in 2014 to great success, with actor-playwright Xander Layden portraying Bill and actor-choreographer-musical director Vanessa Cat belting Jan in the Pan. A year later, the show sold out again with an extended run. “My impetus with all of this,” says Bujeaud, “is I’m a Rocky Horror (Picture Show) girl. I did Rocky Horror all the time in Seattle. I was living in Centralia. We’d all get dressed up and dolled up and drive from Centralia to Seattle for the midnight showing (at the Neptune Theatre) at least twice a month. … Rocky Horror made me feel good. Rocky Horror made me feel like I’m a freak but it’s OK. The musicals right now—What was really popular when we were doing that was Hedwig (and the Angry Inch), and Hedwig is very alternative. It’s very cool, but very, very sad. I wasn’t seeing anything that was kitschy, cliquey, and weird that was just fun. And that was really what we were trying to do.”
TAO was days away from a third production in 2021 when a COVID flare-up made that impossible, so the show’s props and costumes went into storage. Everyone assumed they’d be recycled in other shows down the road. In 2016 and 2024, two other, unassociated, musical stage versions were developed and produced in Charleston, South Carolina, and Ypsilanti, Michigan, respectively.
“Hopefully,” says Bujeaud of her own adaptation, “if somebody sees this in Seattle and thinks, ‘Hey, this might be fun to put on,’ we’ll have more money to try and put the score together.” She’s referring to the emphatically punctuated The HEAD!!! That Wouldn’t DIE!s upcoming, one-night-only performance at Seattle Worldcon 2025. Worldcon is the annual science fiction convention at which members of the World Science Fiction Society vote on and bestow the Hugo Awards for sci-fi and fantasy literature. This year’s featured guests of honor include master illustrator Donato Giancola and Martha Wells, author of the bestselling (and Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning) series The Murderbot Diaries. The musical will be presented in Ballroom 2 of the Seattle Convention Center at 7 p.m. Thursday, August 14, 2025, as a free perquisite to convention attendees.
After over a decade as a struggling, vagabond company, TAO teamed up with Broadway Olympia in to secure a great deal on a space at Olympia’s Capital Mall, which it shared with TAO under the joint name “OlyTheater.” Shortly thereafter, Worldcon program division head SunnyJim Morgan approached TAO with an intriguing offer. “Jim came up to me and said, ‘We’re trying to get Worldcon to Seattle. If Worldcon comes to Seattle, would you be willing to do Head?’ They proposed it; it was not in my vision at all. I was so busy churning out what we were doing, trying to get that (mall) space going, but I said sure. Let me proverbially sign on the dotted line. So I had committed to that, and I’m a flake, but if I make a commitment, if I say yes, I mean it. And then we lost the space.”
With very little notice, the mall had decided to give that retail space to an art gallery, and TAO was obliged to pack its belongings yet again. It’s still scouting for permanent digs a year and a half later, so the Worldcon revival of HEAD, preceded by its Lakewood Playhouse run, will be its first official production since the summer of 2024. Layden has returned to play Bill, and Cat is once again the show’s choreographer. South Puget Sound actor Lesley Gordon has assumed the role of Jan. The show rehearsed at Lakewood Playhouse in mid-March, and TAO will present the show at the Playhouse over the first two weekends in April. See olytheater.com for more details or to buy tickets to the Lakewood production.
Bujeaud thinks the message of the show is we’re each capable of transcending the expectations society has of us. “They think they know who we are,” she explains. “They think Bill is great. They think Jan is fulfilling her purpose as a woman, to work until she finds a man. I think this play is very much saying you don’t get to make choices for other people. You don’t get to decide who we are. Because historically that has happened to a lot of us.”
The show, its song list in particular, has mutated over time. “We have a musical director now,” says TAO’s vice president, John Serembe, who’s playing both the monster and Bill’s father, Dr. Corman Cortner. “Before, we were just singing. Now she’s worked out actual harmonies.”
“I’ve got a whole new song to learn,” adds Layden. “It’s a celebration of good, old-fashioned, American values.” Has the character of Bill evolved at all? “No,” Layden replies, “and I think he would appreciate that.”
Bujeaud is understandably proud of her weird little musical that could and could, and will, and maybe will yet again in years to come. “It took a whole group of people to do this,” she concludes. “Everybody really committed to putting this show together. We call this the TAO collective – and I mean that.”
Virginia Leith, the original Jan in the Pan, died Nov. 14, 2019, at the age of 94. Her IMDb page lists 26 acting credits. Her stepdaughter, Mary Harron, directed the 2000 film version of American Psycho. In an apt twist of fate, Leith’s Wikipedia biography reports “her body was donated to medical science at the UCLA Medical School.”
To learn more about Seattle Worldcon, taking place at the Seattle Convention Center｜Summit August 13-17, 2025, please visit seattlein2025.org.
