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What, after all, is the point of hanging out in New York with someone in the theater business if you don't take in a few shows? One of Lauri's friends gave us tickets to her current show A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder, playing at the Walter Kerr Theatre, a delightful musical romp through cold-blooded mass murder in pursuit of inheritance and love. It's based on the same story as the movie Kind Hearts and Coronets and features the same conceit -- as portrayed by Alec Guinness in that movie (and by Peter Sellers in so many movies) -- of one actor playing half the cast, male and female both. In this case, the multi-faceted performer is Jefferson Mays who differentiates the nine roles (8 of them victims of murder) with the sort of broad music-hall caricature that the genre calls for. The other main pillar of the performance is Bryce Pinkham as the delightfully amoral aspiring heir.

The songs were witty, intelligible (not always a given!), and moved the plot along efficiently without much need for other explanation or background knowledge. This was helped, of course, by the plot being a string of basic well-known comedy tropes -- and I say this not in criticism but in admiration. It was a delightfully seamless package of familiar motifs with almost-hummable music. (There were some potentially squirm-inducing stereotypes in the sequence where Lady Hyacinth D'Ysquith is being encouraged to go off on various hopefully-fatal missions to bring charity to assorted third world locales, but this was mitigated somewhat by the primary ridicule being of Hyacinth's motivations and clear ignorance of what she was getting into. Overall, the primary target of satire is upper class British entitlement and obliviousness and the ways in which other characters abet it.) And there was a delightful twist in the end that upsets the default trope of two female romantic leads squabbling over the man. (Although without disturbing the default assumption -- understandable for the Edwardian setting -- that their primary occupation will be squabbling over a man.)

The multi-frame design of the stage provided the opportunity for shifting quickly between various settings as well as visually representing the tale-within-a-tale structure of the narrative. Effective and restrained use of video projection as part of the scenery to enhance certain events that otherwise would rely entirely on audience imagination.

Perhaps one of the odder reactions I had to this performance was that I could easily see this work becoming a favorite of amateur musical theater groups. It's just downright fun.

(Bechdel test rating: fail)