Photo Maria Vartanova

Director Geoff Gruson is dead-on in keeping The Murder Room in top gear. If audiences are given time to think as they watch playwright Jack Sharkey’s send-up of the murder mystery genre unfold, they might focus on the many discrepancies and holes in the zany plot.

But, with Gruson at the helm of the Ottawa Little Theatre production of the quirky 1977 comedy, laughter and just the right level of melodrama are the order of the day.

As Mavis, the gold-digging villain of the piece, Irish O’Brien is appropriately flamboyant, faithless and fast-talking as she tries to murder her husband, Edgar, (a suave Michael McSheffrey) with the honeymoon less than a day old. McSheffrey handles his contrasting double role as the young and slightly bumbling police constable equally well. (The connection is explained, sort of….)

As the long-time housekeeper, Lottie, Kelly Fuoco is effective and funny as she emphasizes her loyalty to Edgar and his daughter, Susan, and her suspicion of Mavis, while Maryse Fernandes, as Susan, must focus on being the dimmest of Barbie types. Yet, despite her empty-headedness, she has attracted the attention of a young American millionaire (played with a strong Southern accent by Phillip David Merriman) and the pair arrives on the scene newly engaged. Rounding off the cast is Michael McCarville as the police inspector with a hidden agenda, charged with investigating Edgar’s sudden disappearance.

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Photo: Maria Vartanova

Who said murderous scenarios can’t be funny? The bumbling gang in Jack Sharkey’s farcical The Murder Room, mounted with vigour and tongue firmly in cheek at OLT, are downright hilarious as they grapple with being either ill-intentioned but wholly likeable baddies or easily distracted but self-absorbed goodies.

The plot, a spoofy spin on the classic British murder mystery with dashes of meta-theatre in the quick-draw dialogue, is straightforward despite the characters’ facility for turning the simplest event into a three-act drama. The lusty and deceptive Mavis Templeton (Irish O’Brien) decides to bump off her credulous new husband Edgar Hollister (Michael McSheffrey) so she can inherit his money and be with her lover. Suffice to say that things get complicated as others are drawn in including Edgar’s clueless daughter Susan (Maryse Fernandes), her dimbulb Yankee beau Barry Draper (Phillip David Merriman, whose American South accent is confusing), Hollister’s bustling housekeeper Lottie Molloy (Kelly Fuoco), and the tippling Inspector James Crandall (Michael McCarville). Also on hand: the investigatively challenged Constable Abel Howard Andrew (McSheffrey again).

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The plot (if that’s not too strong a word) of The Underpants revolves around the embarrassment of a repressed wife losing her underwear in a public place while watching the King’s parade.

Sadly, the primary embarrassment of the Theatre Kraken version of the German comedy is the poor quality of the production and some unfortunate directorial choices.

The play, as adapted from Carl Sternheim’s 1910 farce Die Hose, by actor/comedian Steve Martin, is more scatological and sophomoric in its humour than the social commentary on the German bourgeoisie of the period that seems to have been Sternheim’s intent.

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Steve Martin’s adaptation is the clue to this essentially expressionist based comedy by Carl Sternheim written in German in 1910. Directed by Don Fex, the play concerns a husband drowned in the bureaucracy of the Monarchy echoeing  Gogol’s wild Russian comedy The Revizor and foretelling  Kafka’s alienation within the terrifying bureaucratic state in the Trial (1925). It even suggests  tinges of antisemitism that pop up in the dialogue between Mr. Cohen and Theo, the tyrannical husband, an iconic pre-fascist bully typical of the prewar literatures of central Europe. However, once Steve Martin got his hands on it the time frame, the references all collapsed and gave rise to total chaos. We were left with something that is no longer linked to any particular historical period but that brings them all in as a hysterical salad whose ingredients are clearly left to the choice of director, Don Fex. In the background we hear Marlene Dietrich singing cabaret style songs from the 1920’s in the Blue Angel style; we hear military marches from the Austro-Hungarian pre WWI period, the suggestions lead us to believe we were in a pre-1914 period suggested by the women’s costumes which were quite beautiful . Although Gertrude’s bustle…which wasn’t really a bustle, was out of date already.

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Photo:  Keith Pattison 

Like the Tin Man, this version of The Wizard of Oz has a hollow ring because its heart is missing.

The emphasis is on the spectacle and technological wizardry. Such moments as the video of the tornado that transports the heroine, Dorothy, from Kansas to the other side of the rainbow into the fairytale Land of Oz may be breathtaking for some. The broom belonging to the Wicked Witch of the West that breathes fire, dragon-style, or the image of the menacing Wizard that is more over-the-top than Dr. Who may raise a gasp of admiration once. Just once.

But the key aspect of the production should be in caring about the characters, rather than simply viewing their passage through Oz from Munchkinland, through the scary forest and the Wicked Witch’s territory to the Wizard’s castle and back again to awaken in Kansas.

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Published in the Ottawa Citizen on December 30, 2015

 Photo: Daniel Swalec

There are some pretty cool videos depicting the tornado that sweeps Dorothy and her dog Toto from a Kansas farm and deposits them in Munchkinland. The broom belonging to the Wicked Witch of the West actually explodes into flame. Oz thunders like a petulant god. But modern technical effects aside, at its heart, the joyously executed musical The Wizard of Oz now playing to families at the NAC remains a story rooted in early 20^th century rural America when, at least to our contemporary eyes, a kind of pre-ironic innocence and belief that love and kindness could trump evil prevailed.

The production, drawn from L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s book and based on the classic 1939 movie with Judy Garland as Dorothy, wisely avoids updating the original story settings or trajectory.

The farm where Dorothy (the wholly convincing and powerfully voiced Sarah Lasko) feels unwanted by her distracted Auntie Em (Ottawa’s Emmanuelle Zeesman) and Uncle Henry (Randy Charleville) is vintage turn-of-the-century complete with a jerry-built generator that needs the whack of an axe to run.

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