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| Nick DeSantis as Kit (Tracy Martin) |
Village Theatre
Issaquah: through April 26, 2015
Everett: May 1-24, 2015
The history of the musical currently showing at Village
Theatre is long, even for the normally-long development process for musicals!
Starting as a book by William Goldman (author
of The Princess Bride), No Way To Treat a Lady was made into a
movie. Douglas J. Cohen saw the 1968
movie and was inspired to make it his first musical.
He was able to get it produced Off-Broadway in 1987! Here’s
a link to a review. It was revived Off-Broadway in 1996, and Alix Korey was nominated for an Outer
Critics’ Circle award for playing the showiest role in the musical (referenced
below).
In the years since, he’s written over a dozen musicals, as
listed on his web site, but has gone back several times to
tinker with and improve (at least for him) this musical. He brought the musical
to Village in 1999 to work on it. (Now, Village has a 14 year old Festival of
New Musicals, which they formally began in 2000.) In 1999, Cohen and Village
Artistic Director Steve Tomkins
collaborated on a newer version, which is unusual for a show that has had two prior
Off-Broadway productions. Today, the musical has been published, but Village Theatre is still treating it as a new musical for this production.
Publication usually signifies that a work is finished.
This year, Cohen came back to Village to work on the
production and make more changes as they remount the show on their main stage.
I’m sure he felt privileged to watch this particular cast sing his songs and
say his words. They are the perfect pocket cast for a comedy. They are some of
the best comedic musical theater actors Seattle has available!
This is a total cast of five. The leads (can you have leads
in a five person cast that’s even-handed in its use of characters?) are the
villain, Nick DeSantis, and the cop,
Dane Stokinger. The others are the
cop’s mother, Jayne Muirhead, the
girlfriend, Jessica Skerritt
(married to Dane in real life), and the villian’s
mother-plus-other-women-who-get-murdered, Village favorite, Bobbi Kotula.
The Village production is, as usual, top notch in technical
areas, as well, with an inventive, cartoon-like set by Bill Forrester that drops down flat drawing-style set boards to
suggest different scene locations, gorgeous and colorful 1960s costuming by Melanie Taylor Burgess, bright lighting
by Aaron Copp, and fun sounds from Brent Warwick. Steve Tomkins directs
briskly with movement help from Crystal
Dawn Munkers (there’s no real dancing exactly). RJ Tancioco music directs surely. Cohen’s music is more challenging
than you might expect from a comedy.
The showiest and funniest role is Kotula’s as many different
characters. She practically steals the show. She usually practically steals a
show, but here she’s got such comedy pros to work with that it makes it that
much harder. But her range of acting, right in front of you, as she morphs from
one older woman to another completely different older woman, is fall on the
floor funny.
DeSantis plays a failed actor who has an obsession with his
dead mother. She’s died a few days before the action starts, and his failures
to live up to her ambitions, which seem to culminate in getting printed about
on the front page of the New York Times, propel him to try to murder older
women to get publicity. We see them interact, as Mother comes to life from a
life-sized painting.
While DeSantis is usually a funny clown, in this production
he is successfully creepy, so you don’t want to laugh at him as much. What the
libretto (book or script) doesn’t quite help you understand, though, from the
beginning, is any kind of back story about Kit’s obsession with his mother. I
think, if there were one thing that could strengthen the musical, it would be a
little more unfolding of his relationship with his mother that results in that
first decision to go murder someone in order to get some publicity.
Besides that, the rest of the play is a romp where you don’t
have to care much about anything except laughing and following the story of the
beleaguered cop who gets phone calls from Kit exhorting him to help get
publicity so they get on the front page of the Times.
The whole cast sings impeccably. The songs are fun to listen
to and everyone gets a chance to shine. The sub-plot about how the cop’s mother
compares him to a more successful brother, and how the girlfriend gets the
mother to accept her gives Muirhead and Skerritt one of the best songs of the
night. Skerritt doesn’t get as much other chance to show her comedic side, as
both she and Stokinger are kind of the “straight” people (comedy-wise) so the
others can ham it up.
This is definitely a show for most of the family. It’s got
‘60s reticence regarding language, so there aren’t any swear words to be afraid
of and aside from the questionable taste of murdering people on stage, what’s
not to like for almost all ages? Nu? As the Jewish mother would say…So, Go!
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