Stage Review: 'Musical Comedy Murders' goes for overkill

Photo by By Rory Dale

Laura Stracko and Michael Gravois in "The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940".

Director Dave Landis can’t be entirely blamed for letting his actors blow themselves up into cartoon characters in “The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940,” a screwball thriller now running at Playhouse on the Square.

The play itself is all about the overstuffed personalities, and when a director hires top local comic performers such as Ann Marie Hall and Kim Justis, he may as well stand back and let them go to town.

And go to town they do.

Photo by By Rory Dale

Laura Stracko and Michael Gravois in "The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940".

Written by John Bishop in 1987, the play is a send-up of mystery movies from Hollywood’s heyday.

Elsa Von Grossenknueten (played by Hall) is an eccentric Broadway financier who has invited the creative team of a new musical to her isolated mansion, a sprawling estate seemingly held together by a network of secret passages.

Her ulterior motive, with the help of Humphrey Bogart-voiced police detective Michael Kelly (Bryan Robinson), is to find a killer. One of the people gathered in her home is also the Stage Door Slasher, murderer of innocent chorus girls.

A menagerie of personality types comes traipsing into the Grossenknueten library, like a game of “Clue” except with theater people. Dressed in jodhpurs and a white scarf, Michael Gravois plays a haughty film and stage director. David Foster is an acerbic, flamboyantly gay composer, while Kim Justis is a drunken lyricist who faints at the sight of guns and knives.

Covered in furs and jewels, producer Marjorie Baverstock (Irene Crist) overuses her new favorite word, “divoon.” David Ryan plays the Irish tenor, Patrick O’Reilly. Liz Sharpe is the mysterious German maid, Helsa.

The cast is rounded out by Laura Stracko as a dizzy chorus girl and Stephen Andrew Parker is a comedian who is a cross between Bert Lahr and Jerry Lewis.

All that’s missing is a Charlie Chan impression.

While the show has some good bits, it is, overall, a gaudy, sloppy mélange of personalities, some more extreme than others. If the entire cast could rise to the same schticky heights as Justis, Hall, and Foster, “The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940” could match laughs with thrills.

'The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940’

The play continues through Oct. 18 at Playhouse on the Square, 51 S. Cooper. Shows are 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $20-$30. Call 726-4656.

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