Joe Kinosian and Kellen Blair’s madcap whodunit musical, Murder for Two, receives its belated Irish première in a hectic, laugh-a-minute staging by Bruiser Theatre Company at Belfast’s The Mac.
First seen in Chicago in 2011, it’s delirious pastiche, laced with frenetic vaudevillian energy and pantomimic camp, of the perennially popular murder mystery—think Agatha Christie reworked by Damon Runyon—made it an Off-Broadway hit in 2013.
Its 2017 UK debut, at the Watermill, Newbury was followed by a run at London’s The Other Place. More recently it was seen at Cirencester’s Barn Theatre in 2022. On both occasions, as here, it reveals itself as the kind of show likely to attract a cult following while eluding mainstream audiences, buckling as it does under the weight of its ambition and the excitable adrenaline of its execution.
Kinosian’s lyrics and Blair’s music (both share authorship of the book) are steeped in the two worlds they gleefully collide together: the country house murder and the Broadway musical. Crime novel aficionados and addicts of the board game Cluedo will revel in its multiple allusions to their shared tropes. Devotees of Broadway will delight in its aping of the Great White Way at its most ostentatious and sentimental.
Considerable fun is to be had from the faultless performances of Rob Gathercole as would-be detective Moscowitz, newly arrived to investigate the murder of a famous novelist (a Colonel Sanders-lookalike if his portrait is to be believed) and Will Arundell’s gymnastic switching between more than a dozen assorted suspects. There’s much frantic hat- and prop-acting as both ricochet around the stage with a sugar-rush excitability that risks feeling as if they are stuck in fast-forward mode.
Lisa May’s energised production takes the piece at face value and is all the better for resisting breaking its anarchic momentum with an interval. That she effortlessly accommodates fourth wall-breaking asides, cheeky local references, an anachronistic mobile phone and the borrowing of an audience member to play a corpse, adds to the evening’s tongue-firmly-in-cheek charm. It’s all, satisfyingly, very silly.
Stylishly inking in the piece’s genre-splicing credentials are Stuart Marshall’s set, Gillian Lennox’s costumes, James C McFetridge’s lighting and Jennifer Rooney’s knowing choreography. Her staging—and Arundell’s playing—of the Las Vegas-era Elton John-styled number threatens to steal the show.
It’s a safe bet that May’s hugely entertaining production will be seen again. After which she might want to take a look at Kinosian and Blair’s latest collaboration, It Came from Outer Space.
After its run at The Mac, Murder for Two travels to Lisburn’s Island Arts Centre, Letterkenny’s An Grianán Theatre, the Theatre at the Mill in Newtownabbey, Armagh’s Market Place Theatre and The Playhouse in Derry for one-night stands. If you can, go!