H.P. Lovecraft, The Musical (?)

One summer long ago I read virtually all of H.P. Lovecraft, the Providence, Rhode Island horror writer often considered the successor of Edgar Allan Poe.

I got hooked.

I recently came across the following incongruous You Tube item. It is- of all things- the Lovecraft story "The Shadow over Innsmouth," set to music and produced in a tone- well, somewhat at variance with the atmosphere Lovecraft strove to create. While fellow Lovecraft fans will probably appreciate it most of all, I think it ought to provide a chuckle to anybody even vaguely familiar with Lovecraft's reputation:



By the way, there actually is a Lovecraft musical, called A Shuggoth on the Roof- a parody of Fiddler which Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick have prevented from actually being produced through threats of legal action. A scheduled production in Chicago had to be canceled a while back; while parody is a legally protected form of art, the producers didn't have deep enough pockets to fight the lawsuits.

You Tube renditions of several of the numbers from Shuggoth (including "If I Were a Deep One") can be found here.

Here's a sample:

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