A derided medium, not quite Dinner Theatre, and not quite Legitimate Theatre, Interactive Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre is a proscenium-less burlesque that tosses in a secondary whodunit with your slapstick comedy and three-course meal. Often mediocre in presentation and decidedly low in content, they depend on stereotypes and audience participation. While the genre is slowly dying out after its popularity in the '90s, Theater Works and Director W. Patrick Walsh have decided to see what happens when you mount it on a legit stage by offering John Bishop's Musical Comedy Murders of 1940. Without limp salads, processed chicken dishes, and boxed key lime pie, it becomes obvious that this kind of silly, inane, clueless script needs better than mediocre direction and presentations to sustain it. Unfortunately, the director does not meet this challenge, and only four in this cast of 10 try to raise it to the necessary level. The result is a show with a wretchedly plodding first act, an increasingly silly, yet surprisingly endurable second act, and a few great performances dragged down by they type of acting you'd expect at, well, a dinner theatre.
Welcome to Elsa Von Grossenknueten's palatial, secret passage-filled, and snowbound estate in a ritzy suburb of New York City. This daughter to a former German spy is hosting a backer's audition for a hand-picked creative team's latest musical, Washington Merry-Go-Round. In attendance are her maid, Helsa Wenzel; the gay composer, Roger Hopewell; drunkenly ascorbic lyricist Bernice Roth; skirt-chasing, name-dropping director Ken De La Maize; fa-boo producer Marjorie Baverstock; and the actors, Irish tenor Patrick O'Reilly; cutesy singer-dancer Nikki Crandall; and comic-relief Eddie McCuen. The truth of the matter is, though, that the first group is the creative team from the ill-fated Manhattan Holiday, a show that was cut short thanks to the murder spree of the Stagedoor Slasher. Police Sergeant Michael Kelly hopes that the killer will be lured by a key piece of evidence. As if this weren't plotty enough, add international espionage, a set of identical triplets from Germany, and a singing transvestite, and you get the idea. Agatha it's not.
In the hands of Mr. Walsh, there's more mugging here than an open-mike night in the Borscht Belt. He's even given us a completely useless prologue that is as silly as it is inexplicable. Everything is played broadly and to the audience, a very specific style that not every actor can handle. This is especially true of the hostess of the evening: Barbara Wood looks ridiculous as Elsa, playing the quirky woman in a most annoying way. Jason M. Hammond's Irish "ty-ner" must take on three different accents at one point in the play, and all of them are terrible. He plays like something out of a bad Abbot & Costello movie. All the cheese in Wisconsin could not compete with Ron Martino's composer Roger, who has somehow gotten it into his head that his character is a sleazy lounge-lizard, and proceeds to give us disingenuous to the hilt. Chip Wood looks uncomfortable as the police sergeant, while Jim McCall struts around aimlessly as director Ken. Poor Cynthia Rose is unable to "div-oon" any depth for her thin-as-paper producer, Marjorie, and proceeds to add her shrill voice to the cacophony.
That is not to say there are no redeemable performances. While she's not given enough character to fill an eyedropper, Julie Cotton still manages to be cute and endearing. While her character is just as flat as the others, Johanna Carlisle still believes in her Dorothy Parker-like writer, and makes her hilarious. M. Harris goes through an entire spectrum of characters, and is a winner by never flinching. The biggest find of the evening is Shaun McNamara, who is the perfect slapstick comedian, and is pinpoint accurate with his pratfalls and double takes. His endearing way makes this heartbreakingly bad, then mediocre show better for his presence. One can only hope we'll see him in a better production, and soon.
The design element is solid. Gregory Jaye's set works well for the production, and Scott Campbell's lighting is solid. Margret Emerson offers great period costumes, and Laura Durant's sound design is appropriately filmic.
While it's true that the show does finally step completely out of bounds by the second act, and becomes as crazy as it needs to become a bit interesting, there's no justification to sit through what precedes to discover this. It's only a shame that a few solid performers are generally wasting their time in this overly-silly farce.
Production Details:
Musical Comedy Murders of 1940
by John Bishop
Theater Works, Peoria
(623) 815-7930
September 15th - October 15th, 2000