Web-Savvy

Nursery rhyme, meet bloody crimes.

You may not care to lull your little tyke to sleep with this tale of an itsy-bitsy psycho spider with incestuous yearnings and homicidal tendencies.

"They really wanted to scare the living crap out of people," says 19-year-old Katie Aquino, who plays the title lunatic in the touring "Spider Baby the Musical," opening tonight at the Onyx Theatre.

"Within five seconds, I'm killing someone. There's blood everywhere."

Do emotions matter amid the splatter? "It's what I like to call a sucker punch," says "Spider Baby" producer/composer Enrique Acosta. "If you lead an audience down a garden path with blood and boobs and salaciousness, and they enjoy it on that level, then you give them some real pathos, it hits them so much harder."

Adapted from the bloody-funny-freaky 1968 film dubbed "The Maddest Story Ever Told" -- with legendary Lon Chaney Jr. in his final performance -- the musical bears a surface resemblance to "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and its horror-themed camp.

However, "Spider," which has played sporadically in America and Canada, owes more to "Sweeney Todd's" demonic zeal.

"Our vision is as a horror-rock musical, but good horror does have humor," says director Helen Acosta, the producer's wife. "The entire genre has been informed by 'Rocky,' and while 'Rocky' is amazing, a horror musical should be scary and dangerous."

(Though that still points toward cult status, Enrique Acosta notes that "if it became a giant hit, I'd cry myself to sleep on a pillow full of $100 bills.")

Dementia and perversion fans, you've hit the gory, grisly jackpot. "Spider Baby" is "The Addams Family" on acid:

In a decaying mansion under a guardian's care, three orphaned siblings suffer from "Merrye Syndrome," a genetic affliction in which they "mentally, socially and physically regress down the evolutionary ladder" until they mix playful innocence with brutal madness.

Result: murder, cannibalism and sexual deviancy.

Virginia, our arachnid-oriented heroine, eats bugs, moves with a spider's deliberate, creepy grace, traps victims in her rope "web" and "stings" them to death using butcher knives.

Plus there's Ginny's icky attraction to "Uncle Peter," turning the usual predator/victim scenario inside out, expressed in a song of unsettling seduction.

"That threw me back when I first heard about the show, because Uncle Peter is tied up in my spider web and I touch him for the first time," Aquino says with a shudder in her voice.

"It's awkward for me and the guy playing Peter, and we have to make sure it's even more uncomfortable for the audience. One night in San Francisco, a guy in the audience was going, 'Gross, gross' the entire time, turning away. My body shakes during the song."

Another sibling, Ralph -- sexually advanced but mentally stunted -- communicates with grunts and leers and moves through the house on a dumb waiter. Mysterious aunts and uncles who have regressed even further live in the cellar, and in a bedroom is kept the skeleton of the family's father, which Virginia unfailingly smooches good night.

"(The caretaker) is dealing with the fact that these children are degenerating," Helen Acosta says. "He gets a letter saying distant relatives are coming to the house with a lawyer. They're trying to put the kids away, and it all ends in tragedy. Everybody blows up."

Considering the characters, that seems the happiest ending possible. Not that "Spider" doesn't tug on some bloody heartstrings. "When I first saw the film and the monologue by Lon Chaney Jr. (as the caretaker), where he expressed his unconditional love for the children, it had me in tears," says Enrique Acosta. "It's what got me started on the first song, it sparked the whole thing."

Vegas is only a tour stop, but the alternative-minded Onyx could be an ideal venue for "Spider" to settle into an open-ended web as a companion piece to its ongoing "Naked Boys Singing" after the recent "Altar Boyz" failed to generate audience fervor.

"If we were offered a permanent spot, we would consider it," Enrique Acosta says. "The longest run we have is an eight-week run in Los Angeles. Right now, we're in our infancy, and we want to be seen by as many people as possible. But there's a certain appeal to having a permanent home."

Barring that, "Spider Baby" will have to creep out audiences crawling city to city. "I was very scared for my mom to see me in the show because it's so extreme," Aquino says.

"When she first saw it in Fresno (Calif.), she was freaked out, like, 'I can't believe you're OK with this.' And I said, 'Eh, it's acting.' "

One would hope so. Otherwise ...

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0256.