Post Dispatch Review a Gentlemans Guide to Love and Murder
Theater Review
Bumping Off Kin, a Song in Your Centre
- A Admirer's Guide to Love and Murder
- NYT Critic's Option
- Broadway, Musical
- 2 hrs. and 20 min.
- Closing Engagement:
- Walter Kerr Theater, 219 W. 48th St.
- 877-250-2929
Series killers may be all the rage on bookshelves and boob tube screens — so ubiquitous, you'd recollect they made upwardly a major demographic of the world population — but they are comparatively rare in the peppier precincts of musical theater. Now, afterwards a long dry spell, Broadway has a deadly sociopath to call its ain. Please give a hearty welcome to Monty Navarro, the conniving killer who helps turn murder virtually foul into entertainment most merry in the new musical "A Gentleman'due south Guide to Love & Murder."
Despite the high trunk count, this delightful show will lift the hearts of all those who've been pining for what sometimes seems a lost fine art form: musicals that match streams of memorable melody with fizzily witty turns of phrase. Bloodlust hasn't sung so sweetly, or provided so much theatrical fun, since Sweeney Todd first wielded his razor with gusto many a long year ago.
The seriously squeamish needn't fearfulness entering the Walter Kerr Theater, where this frolicsome operetta opened on Sunday night. Although our antihero, played with brash innocence lightly sprinkled with arsenic by Bryce Pinkham, eventually piles upwardly a stack of corpses to rival that of honey old Mr. Todd, he's a much cuddlier fellow. A gentleman indeed, whose but wish is to secure his fortune by bumping off a few inconvenient relatives in Edwardian England.
Since these spoiled sprigs on the family tree are mostly stuffed shirts or stuffed skirts — and are all played by the dazzling Jefferson Mays — you'll be laughing too hard to shed a tear for whatever of them. (Those looking for fresh vacation amusement for the family should know there's nothing here to frighten children.)
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Mr. Mays won a Tony Honour for playing multiple roles in the Pulitzer Prize-winning solo bear witness "I Am My Own Married woman," just the chameleonic performance he gives here makes fifty-fifty that feat seem simple — a thing of filing your nails while whistling "Edelweiss," say. In a truthful tour de force that is hardly likely to be bettered on Broadway this season (apologies to the magnificent Mark Rylance, and those two knights, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, performing Beckett and Pinter in repertory), Mr. Mays sings, dances, water ice-skates, bicycles and generally romps through some eight roles — flipping amidst personas male, female and somewhere in between — at a pace that sets your head spinning. (It's virtually an in-joke when one of his doomed characters meets his terminate through decapitation.)
Written by Robert 50. Freedman (book and lyrics) and Steven Lutvak (music and lyrics), both welcome newcomers to Broadway, "Gentleman's Guide" is based on a 1907 novel by Roy Horniman. Fans of British moving picture volition recognize the plot from the archetype British one-act "Kind Hearts and Coronets," which gave Alec Guinness a chance to brandish his own virtuosity as a raft of British gentlefolk falling prey to an aggressive relative. Hither the mood is more farcical, the score a skillful homage to Gilbert and Sullivan, and the well-heeled family is chosen the D'Ysquiths. (That's DIE-squith, wouldn't you know.)
The penniless Monty footling knows of his relationship to the clan when nosotros observe him, in the opening scene, mourning his newly deceased mother. A visit from an onetime friend of hers, the nosy Miss Shingle (the fantabulous Jane Carr), brings startling news: The mother he knew only as a Dickensian sufferer — scrubbing floors to feed her dearest simply son — was in fact a highborn D'Ysquith, banished forever when she ran off with a Castilian, defying her family's wishes.
"And past my estimation," Miss Shingle casually adds, "but eight other relations stand up betwixt you and the current Earl of Highhurst, Lord Adalbert D'Ysquith himself."
This tempting tidbit lodges in Monty's fertile heed and begins forthwith to sow dark intentions. Monty is on the verge of losing his love, the socially ambitious Sibella Hallward (Lisa O'Hare), to a more than well-heeled homo. Might she non reconsider if Monty were to establish himself as a bona fide D'Ysquith, or better yet, to hack his manner through all that underbrush on the family tree and arrive at the tippy top, condign the ninth earl of Highhurst?
Fortune favors the brave, and soon Monty — through happenstance and the occasional fleck of malicious handiwork — is rocketing upward the social scale, equally his relatives fall victim to unhappy, ahem, accidents. Under the nicely pitched direction of Darko Tresnjak — a Shakespeare specialist hither making his own impressive Broadway debut — Monty's journey unfolds as a series of brisk comic vignettes, set to songs that honorably re-create the boisterous heyday of the English music hall and the prime number of 19th-century operetta. (The mannerly set, by Alexander Dodge, features a gorgeously detailed Victorian-mode stage within a stage, and the spot-on period costumes are by Linda Cho.)
Prototype
I could fill up the rest of my review with quotations from the lyrics that specially tickled. Here'south just a morsel, from one of the evidence'due south highlights, a comic ditty lampooning the rapacities of would-be do-gooders, in which Lady Hyacinth D'Ysquith (Mr. Mays, natch), drastic to find a new crusade to champion, lights on the opportunities in darkest Africa:
We'll civilize a hamlet in the jungle!
It can't take long to larn their mother natural language!
Of words they have but six,
And five of them are clicks,
And all of them are different words for dung!
Mr. Lutvak and Mr. Freedman may be reworking forms that have been previously established, primarily the patter vocal and the romantic ballad. But their score still establishes itself equally one of the most accomplished (and probably the most literate) to exist heard on Broadway in the past dozen years or and then, since the less rigorous requirements of pop songwriting have taken over.
It is beautifully sung by the rich-voiced cast, with Mr. Pinkham handling his heavy chores with a lite bear on, his business firm tenor matched by pleasingly (and necessarily) precise wording. Ms. O'Hare plays Sibella with pertness and poise, and has a bright, clear soprano. And then, too, does the wonderful Lauren Worsham, who plays Phoebe D'Ysquith, the rival for Monty's center, with a demure sugariness that never cloys. (Fortunately for Phoebe, she is non in the directly line of heirs to the D'Ysquith fortune.)
Mr. Mays is non a musical theater specialist, to be certain, which makes his accomplishment here all the more impressive. Most of his songs don't make any great demands on the tonsils (he's largely doing patter material), merely he manages to sing in a variety of voices, distinguishing each character with a distinctive sound.
A distinctive expect and personality, too: the dazed, toothy dottiness of the Rev. Lord D'Ezekial; the buxom heartiness of Lady Hyacinth; the pompous grumpiness of the reigning Lord Adalbert; the tallyho perkiness of the bright-eyed beekeeper Henry (spinning forth hilarious yet never vulgar double-entendres in a mock-homoerotic duet with Monty, "Better With a Man").
As each precise caricature of British snootiness or silliness comes bounding onto the stage, Mr. Mays seems to be challenging himself to arm-twist bigger laughs, and he well-nigh ever succeeds. All just one of his characters ends up six feet under past the time this daffy, inspired musical concludes, but his bright performance deserves to be immortalized in Broadway lore for some time to come up.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/18/theater/reviews/a-gentlemans-guide-to-love-and-murder-on-broadway.html
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