Buster Canfield's Apocalyptic Miracle Show: And tentacles!
05 Jun 2025 - Photos courtesy of Eldritch Theatre

There can be little doubt that our current times feel perched on the edge of an apocalypse. Perhaps just not the dire horrific apocalypse that Buster Canfield warns us of. Owing more than a little to the writings of HP Lovecraft, Canfield prophesies terror beyond imagining in a torrent of doom-laden, vividly preached words. Punctuated with "And tentacles!" The Old Ones are awakening, ready to bring forth madness, destruction and an endless reign of despair. Fortunately Canfield also has a solution. He's not selling snake oil, he's selling Buster Canfield's Thaumaturgical Wonder Soap which has a variety of magical powers that vary from pitch to pitch. As The Singing Conjoined Carcosa Sisters warble, "Less tragic, more magic/With just one daily scrub, you'll be a necromancer" and "Warp your reality and smell good doing it." Or, their more pointed pitch at the finale in "Would You Like to Be a Warlock," "The soap can fill you with hope/Slay the monster so you cope/So buy some don't be a dope." 

At the end of Buster Canfield's Apocalyptic Miracle Show, I did buy a bar of Buster Canfield's Thaumaturgical Wonder Soap and not just because of the Sister's tuneful trills, or Canfield's remarkable demonstrations, but because I experienced it in action. Suffice it to say that I was one of the lucky audience members who was ordered on stage to participate. As instructed, I rubbed a bar of Buster Canfield's Thaumaturgical Wonder Soap over my third eye, which allowed Canfield to probe psychically deep into the depths of my turbulent soul (I had been instructed to attempt to clear my churning mind by picturing an erotically grotesque act between fantastical creatures) and correctly identify the playing card secreted in my back pocket. It was a miracle! Magic! And my third eye still feels opened to observe the universe. But that might be a side effect of laughing so heartily and continually.

The Sisters intersperse, like demon angels stumbling in from a long-lost Lawrence Welk program beamed directly from Hell, to sing of Cthulhu, zombies ("We're walking slow/Because rigor mortis stiffens from head to toe"), and deliriously that "I'm going to buy a voodoo doll that I can call my own." They really do have harmonies so sweet and tight that "they could only come from a single set of lungs." It's their subject matter that is ghoulish, grisly and hilarious. Natalia Bushnik and Kathleen Welch (The Strange and Eerie Memoirs of Billy Wuthergloom, Suddenly Last Summer) play the Sisters as bickering, busty beauties who, as Canfield remarks, "Take forever to get offstage but always win the office picnic three-legged race." In the grand tradition of '40s girl groups and vaudeville, they pilfer popular tunes and lyricize them to their own twisted intentions. They are delightful and their tentacle choreography is sinuous, sensual and sordidly sinister.

Eric Woolfe (Macbeth, The Strange and Eerie Memoirs of Billy Wuthergloom, Phantasmagoria 3D!, ;MacBeth A Tale Told By an Idiot, The House at Poe Corner, Dr Weathergloom's Here There Be Monsters, As You Like It) is Buster Canfield "a wandering wizard who when not itinerant resides in the mystic realm of Tor-on-o-to," and he confounds with demonstrations of sleight of hand, mentalism. unbreakable rings of steel from outer space, breeding shoggoths, and the locked contents of a weathered otherworldly cigar box rescued from the sands of ancient Egypt. And of course there is puppetry with a deranged visit from Pye Wackit, Canfield's raccoon familiar, a furball full of life (until put into a shamanistic trance) and prone to prophecy. Part of the fun of a magic show is watching intently to see how it is done. To catch the magician in the act. When a prop proves slightly inadequate, Canfield jokes about the necessity of suspension of disbelief , then creates seamless magic that makes us believe. A theme, in an otherwise comic romp with sinister overtones, emerges.

Released from the constraints of a confining text, Woolfe's natural showmanship expands to fill the theatre. The demonstrations are full of flair but also wonder, daring, and quicksilver changes of approach to suit his willing, or initially reluctant, subjects. He cajoles, banters, insults, wise cracks, flirts shamelessly, and continually astonishes. Always with a twinkle in his penetrating eyes and with his tongue—when not evangelizing horrors or slipping in references both obscure, absurd, literary or occult— lodged firmly in his cheek. If Woolfe were to actually decide to sell more than soap, he could be the most successful huckster of all time. He is that smooth, sly and brazen.  We don't quite believe that magic is real—though I will again testify to the veracity of his claims about Buster Canfield's Thaumaturgical Wonder Soap—but then we would also have to accept Canfield's reality of the approaching apocalypse which is even worse than our own. Best to not be a dope and buy soap just in case.