Manual Cinema will perform “Frankenstein” at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts Friday at 7:30 p.m. The show might be a little spooky but is appropriate for younger audiences as well as older ones.

“Frankenstein” is a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Gothic classic on what it means to be human and the dichotomy between nature and technology. However, Manual Cinema brings a unique twist to the story and on theater as a whole. Their performances incorporate actors, shadow puppets, live orchestral music, robot musicians, Japanese Bunraku puppets and film screens. A large film screen is placed above so audiences can watch the story, and just below on stage, the cast and crew play instruments and move paper cutouts along overhead projectors all in real-time. It’s like watching the finished product and the behind-the-scenes simultaneously.

“It probably feels most like going to see a movie, but when you look down you realize everything you’re seeing and hearing is being created live,” said Kyle Vegter, Manual Cinema artistic director.

There’s little dialog in a Manual Cinema show. Like a silent film, the performers rely more on visuals and music to progress the story.

Multimedia theater group Manual Cinema will perform “Frankenstein” at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts Friday. (Photo provided)

Doing an adaptation is new territory for Manual Cinema, Vegter said.

“Most of our shows are original stories,” he said. “One artistic director writes the story and we flesh it out. Writing the actual narrative is generally what takes the most time. We knew for this next piece we wanted an already existing work and to find a way to fit it into our medium. ‘Frankenstein’ already has a dark, spooky, almost noir quality that we enjoyed.

The theater group also wanted to explore the author in this show.

“‘Frankenstein’ is like a Russian nesting doll. It has stories within stories within stories,” Vegter said. “We thought it was time to tell Mary Shelley’s story. The book is separated into three parts, and we wanted to add a fourth about the author. When she started writing the book, she was 18 years old, just lost a child and her sister committed suicide. It’s an interesting biography that no one’s dived into yet.”

Another theme in “Frankenstein” is the idea of technology’s expanse.

“In the development of the piece, we were thinking a lot about how this is relevant in 2019,” Vegter said. “We surrounded by automated workforces and lifeless things coming to life. That’s why we incorporated this super cool percussive robot into the music. It’s got all these little pistons you can send mini messages to, and it’ll perform a piece of music.”

An interesting element of the show is the music and how the instruments relate to the characters similar to how every instrument in Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” represents someone in the narrative. While traditional instruments like violins and cellos appear in the “Frankenstein,” they’re also unconventional noisemakers such as hubcaps and a kitchen sink.

“My favorite scene is in the graveyard when he started to actually create the monster,” Vegter said. “He’s cutting off body parts. It’s one of the grosser intense scenes, and we wanted sounds from this array of junk to reflect that.”

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If you go …

What: Manual Cinema’s “Frankenstein”

Where: Lake Placid Center for the Arts, 17 Algonquin Drive, Lake Placid

When: Friday at 7:30 p.m.

How much: Tickets are $20 in advance and $25 at the door