A theatre director’s job is never finished. Casting the right people, making suggestions for the script, working with costume, music, lighting, choreography and production designers to make sure everything is flawless.
And of course, scrubbing all that blood off the stage.
“We had this polished black vinyl floor, which looks incredible under lights, and dramaturgically, because of reflective surfaces and mirrors, but to clean blood off, uggh,” groans Mark Taylor, director of American Psycho A Musical Thriller.
As anyone who has read the 1991 Bret Easton Ellis book or seen the 2000 Christian Bale movie knows, the story of Patrick Bateman, the handsome 1987 investment banker and serial axe murderer, requires a lot of blood.
The musical version is funnier and campier than the film, with synth-led odes to capitalism and violence and a TV playing everything from Jane Fonda workout video clips to quotes from Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal. After a sell-out run last year, the show is returning to Chapel Off Chapel this month – and Taylor is glad to report, they’re using a new recipe for all that blood.
“The blood was made of honey,” Taylor says. “Everything stunk, and there were ants.”
“It smelled sickly sweet,” says Conor Beaumont, who is reprising his role as Patrick. “That was an interesting sensory experience to be killing someone with an axe while getting sprayed in the face with what seems like sugar.”
Beaumont will be donning Patrick’s designer suits again after a successful run as JD in a musical version of Heathers. “He’s so good at being typecast as a psychotic young man,” Taylor laughs.
But Beaumont himself, a committed musical theatre fan whose dream role would be lovestruck musician Orpheus in Hadestown, could not be further from his dangerous alter egos.
“I have distinct memories of washing the blood out of my hair every single night, taking a long, long shower after the show,” Beaumont says. “Also, to get the character off my body, I found it was really useful to kind of physically scrub him off my body.”
An irony, perhaps, given Bateman’s own obsession with grooming and cleanliness. While an almond body scrub, face mask and moisturiser with an under-eye balm seemed extreme for a man in 1987, in today’s #GRWM world of snail mucin and 25-step Korean skincare regimens, it seems almost laughably low-maintenance.
But Patrick’s obsession with his looks, gym routine and designer clothing are almost tailor-made for TikTok – without the context, of course, that this is a satire, not an aspiration. Taylor says although the team behind the show expected theatre kids, slasher obsessives and fans of the movie, they did not anticipate the show’s audience to also include younger men who had seen clips of Patrick’s wealth and morning routine but had never seen the entire story.
“The one that was interesting for us was the TikTok audience, the younger audiences who seem to know Patrick through short edits of the film on TikTok, and also the sigma male culture that they seem to get a lot of. It was interesting getting them in, who didn’t quite understand the piece as a whole,” Taylor says.
Ellis’ brutal novel was meant to skewer the world of 1987 – one that was obsessed with wealth, fame and looks – but today’s would give him far more material.
In 1987, the richest person in the world was Japanese businessman Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, who had a net worth of about $US20 billion, or about $US47 billion in today’s money. Elon Musk has more than 40 times that much – and he was, for a while, a trillionaire. The Tate brothers, monstrously popular, are on rape and sex-trafficking charges – which only burnishes their stars. And Patrick’s idol, Donald Trump, is the so-called leader of the free world.
“For me, he’s a bit of a looksmaxxer,” Beaumont says of his character. “He’s just prioritising everything on the outside in order to make his life as easy and as good as possible without reconciling any of the internal world.”
Bale played Patrick as a titan of industry – soulless, yes, but an extreme example of the American alpha male. But for Beaumont, Patrick is a different archetype – that of the incel, a misogynist loser who is chronically online and lacks an iota of self-actualisation.
“It’s way too relevant right now, which is really disappointing,” Beaumont says. “I came in specifically thinking a lot about incel culture and the ‘black pill’ world, which is this culture of misogyny where men end up essentially blaming women for the state of the world as it is right now, and failing to look inward or do any kind of self-analysis or self-interrogation and see how everybody is a product of their society.”
Taylor agrees that the show and Patrick the character are even more relevant today than they were when the book and movie came out.
“In 2026, Patrick Bateman would have his own podcast,” Taylor says. “Without a doubt.”
American Psycho will play at Chapel Off Chapel October 29-November 15.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.