Playwright: John Bishop
At: Drury Lane Oak Brook, Oak Brook
Phone: ( 630 ) 530-0111
Through: Feb. 27
By Catey Sullivan
The Drury Lane, Oak Brook season ends with a whimper with The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940, a morass of a show that is billed as a comic thriller but is actually neither.
Granted, John Bishop's play makes no pretensions toward being anything other than the silliest of mindless diversions concocted from the hoariest of clichés. Dark and stormy night? Check. Isolated mansion filled with secret passageways? Check. Ominous masked man lurking about with a butcher knife? Check. There's also a dame, a drunk, a hard-boiled detective and a maid with a sinister way of setting out the tea things.
But whereas some shows can rip off pop culture chestnuts with intelligence and hilarity ( The Moustrap ) , The Musical Comedy Murders does so with a lazy, oafish stupidity that makes the two-hour show seem like a purgatorial lifetime.
That lifetime begins when a skulking figure in a trench coat stalks and then stabs a properly starched maid in the parlor of what one assumes is a mansion. After an interminable bit of business intended to be a sight gag, the murderer stuffs the body in a closet. The next time we see the dead maid, she's been stripped of her uniform and is propped up against the closet door in her underwear.
Call me humorless, but I found the image creepy. ( Besides which, if you want to see scantily clad women sprawling in just-been-attacked poses, one only has to flip through the ad layouts of Vogue or Cosmo. )
Exposition comes via a crackling radio broadcast that alerts the audience to a pending snowstorm and the fact that a chorus-girl murdering serial killer is on the loose. With those bits of critical knowledge established, a group of musical-theater types converges on the house. They think they're there for a backers audition, but actually—well—let's just say the FBI and the aforementioned serial killer are involved with the real reasons they've all been summoned.
Of the types on stage—perky ingénue, fey director, Irish tenor—only Iris Lieberman's drunken, bohemian librettist manages to rise above the material and create a character of interest.
But one can't blame the actors, not when the material is this flat, obvious and clunky. Musical Comedy Murders aspires to a mix of satire and thrills, like the aforementioned Mousetrap. It manages only tedium.
Ostensibly, Drury Lane Artistic Director Ray Frewen has a hand in picking the material his theater presents each season. The real mystery here is why he settled for such mediocre material. If Drury Lane wants to survive to serve the next generation of audiences, it's going to have to make smarter choices.