Poe is Dead: A New Musical

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 “Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”  

 Edgar Allan Poe 

Playwright Adam Hoffman wrote Quoth the Raven as a touring production for a local professional theatre in 2008.  It was later expanded to a full stage production and has been mounted several times.  In 2023, composer Jacob Bremkamp approached Hoffman to create a musical from Quoth the Raven and Poe is Dead: A New Musical was born.

Poe is Dead: A New Musical offers a fresh perspective on the macabre and eerily timeless stories and poems of American gothic author, Edgar Allan Poe. The show invites us to rediscover his complex and deeply personal exploration of the transformation of the human condition, featuring music and lyrics by Jacob Bremkamp, book by Adam Hoffman, and direction by Deb Lemire.

The piece is a work in progress. It has had many incarnations, from its beginnings as a short play with a modest tour, growing into a presentation on the CNVP Railroad, blossoming into a full-scale musical revue at Cleveland State University— each time it is reshaped to best tell the stories we know and love. We are getting close to its final draft and hope this production takes us to the next level.

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most hauntingly brilliant figures in American literature. His work is a masterclass in atmosphere, psychological depth, and linguistic precision. Poe didn’t just write horror—he sculpted dread with a scalpel’s precision. Delving into madness, obsession, and the fragility of reality, his fiction mirrored his own life—marked by tragedy, poverty, and mystery. He died under strange and unknown circumstances that elude us to this day.