Guilty-Party Pleasures

In this treasure trove of golden-age
show-biz trivia, which is the current Appleseed Productions effort at
the Atonement Lutheran Church, 116 W. Glen Ave., the characters on
stage often evoke performers still seen on cable’s Turner Movie
Classics. Like the smart-talking producer, Marjorie Baverstock (Angela
Newman), given to pretentious mispronunciation, who looks and sounds
like Rosalind Russell. Somewhere among the 10 people on stage is the
Stage Door Slasher. If that identity would lie still for a moment we
could figure out who he or she is.

The setting may sound familiar. We see
what might be the first murder take place at midnight in an isolated
mansion during a December snowstorm. As luck would have it, the
telephone service is out, and during any revealing moment in a
conversation the lights may black out as well. World War II is raging
in Europe, but as it is 1940, the United States is still neutral. A
radio broadcast informs that German spies and saboteurs are loose. How
cheering to learn that the mansion belongs to Elsa von Grossenknuten
(Nora O’Dea), whose name might translate as “great terror.” On her wall
lies a portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm from the previous war in Europe. But
we’re in Chappaqua, Westchester County, 60 years before Bill and
Hillary settled there.

After all those ominous signs, we’re
gladdened to know the mansion is scheduled to entertain showpeople,
including Irish tenor Patrick O’Reilly (Bill Ali) and snotty and
condescending director Ken De La Maize (Rick Signorelli). Joining them
are the songwriting team of Roger Hopewell (Brian Pringle) and Bernice
Roth (Linda Crewell), the latter given to wearing turbans and tippling
all the booze she can find. Feeling a little less welcome are a
beautiful leading lady, Nikki Crandall (Wendy Sikorski), and a dorky
failed comic, Eddie McCuen (Gerrit Vander Werff Jr.), who can’t tell a
joke to save his life. A German maid (Erin Race) may or may not be
Helsa Wenzel. Privately, hostess Elsa meets with Irish cop Michael
Kelly (Christopher James), who adopts a series of disguises to cover
the real reason for his presence.

Cop Kelly is there because Elsa has two
reasons for assembling her guests. One is to raise money for a new
Broadway musical to be titled White House Merry-Go-Round. The
second is detective work: to learn the identity of the Stage Door
Slasher. The murderer last struck during the run of Roger and Bernice’s
recent hit, Manhattan Holiday, when he or she bumped off Bebe
McAllister, a special friend (nudge-nudge) of Elsa. Actually, Elsa,
Helsa and Bebe have all had a good time in each other’s company when
the boys were not around (nudge again). Anyway, Elsa is sure that the
real killer is present in the mansion, and finding the true identity
might make an excellent party game.

The late John Bishop wrote and directed Musical Comedy Murders for
the New York stage in 1987, where it was a substantial hit. It has been
a community theater favorite ever since, last appearing locally in
1991. The source of Bishop’s frivolity is not Agatha Christie but
rather the 1939 Bob Hope movie The Cat and the Canary, itself a spoof of the 1932 James Whale-Boris Karloff thriller The Old Dark House,
based on a J.B. Priestley play. Put another way, Mr. Vander Werff is a
stand-in for Bob Hope, although his best moment comes in a riff on
Danny Kaye where he zips through a lickety-split tongue-twister of
sound-alike place names.

Under Jon Wilson’s direction, much of the fun of Murders
has nothing to do with solving the plot. Elsa reads a fake letter from
the deceased Bebe without being sure just what is in it while Officer
Kelly, in disguise, signals to her in maladroit charades what might be
in the letter. There are quite a few zingers in the dialogue, as when
director De La Maize describes Hollywood as “the Garment District
surrounded by orange groves.” Sight gags turn on sexual
misidentification, like why does tenor O’Reilly writhe between Helsa’s
legs while trying to get something from her hands? One ongoing gag
delights without actually getting a laugh. That’s when De La Maize
announces the casts of movies he’s just made, usually with people like
Sidney Blackmer and John Carradine, and everyone tells him how much
they loved it—until he reveals it has not yet been released.

A few jokes have faded in 21 years, now that there are
fewer people in the audience who can remember 1940. That was the year
the musicians’ strike limited radio broadcasts to music from public
domain, like endless reruns of Stephen Foster’s “Jeannie with the Light
Brown Hair.”

More interesting than the real identity
of the Slasher, who is indeed present, is that the songwriting team of
Hopewell and Roth decide to write a musical set on the American
frontier, where the wind comes whistling down the plain and there’s a
bright golden haze on the meadow. They’ve already come up with a
novelty song about a surrey with “frilly little crap” on top. It will
be called Nebraska!

This production runs through May 17. See Times Table for information.

Correction

In the May 7 stage review of Appleseed Productions’ current show The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940, a photo incorrectly identified Gerrit Vander Werff Jr., when the performer in the picture was actually Paul Gundersen.