Audio By Carbonatix
Pocket Sandwich Theatre takes a break from its usual
popcorn-throwing fluff to give audiences something better to chew on,
the premiere of Death: The Musical, a new R-rated musical
comedy by Dallas composer-writer Scott A. Eckert. The title might be a
harder sell than Macbeth, but the show itself is a clever thing
built around a deliciously complicated concept.
It’s Noises Off meets Sweeney Todd when a
low-end company of 12 actors attempts to perform a bland British
drawing room mystery called Death Notwithstanding. Before the
play-within-the-play begins, however, the bloke begging the audience to
turn off their cell phones suddenly turns toes up center stage.
“Curtain speech guy” is the first casualty in a series of murders that
fells cast members one by one. The pattern is quickly established: Each
time someone is offed in the interior farce, the actor in that role
meets his or her doom offstage right after. Soon the smart ones in the
cast start refusing to exit, but the others force them to stick to the
script. Bodies keep piling up (in one case, dropping from the rafters)
until the big reveal of the backstage murderer in the finale.
Eckert, a frequent musical director for shows at Uptown
Players and other Dallas theaters, really has something here. His
melodies are bright and fast, with opportunities for good voices to
belt some big notes. His lyrics are wickedly witty. Most of the songs
offer bitter observations on the drearier aspects of the acting life.
In “The Show Must Go On,” they sing: “It’s not for the dreams of
glamour and glitz/It’s a fool who believes they’ll come true/We crawl
through the flops and fly through the hits/Just to say that we’ve done
them all when we’re through.”
The bimbo starlet, all sexy squeaks and deadpan stares as
played by Alexis Nabors, gets the best spotlight solo, “Never Mind
Carly,” confessing she’s perfectly willing to use her bouncy assets to
get ahead: “Maybe I’m needy/Maybe I’m cheap/Maybe I prefer the course
that doesn’t run deep.” The company diva, Vivian, played by dynamite
singer Sara Shelby-Martin, gets an 11 o’clock number that seems
inspired by “Rose’s Turn” in Gypsy. In “I’m Going Back,” Viv
imagines returning to Broadway, where she once reigned: “I’m going back
for good/This time I’ll hold on tighter/I’ll take the track I should
have run before, a second chance to be/The star I once was,
brighter.”
Eckert has an impressive, Sondheim-y knack for crisp rhymes.
In one comic patter song, a character actor (Jonathan McCurry) who
specializes in portraying the victim brags about his talent for getting
croaked. The tune’s called “You’ve Never Really Lived Until You’ve
Died”:
I’ve been smashed, crashed, trashed and bashed,
Pilled and poison darted.
Sliced, riced, julienne-diced,
Grilled and Cuisinarted.
Some people claim it’s a job for a dunce,
They say, “Dying is easy, comedy’s hard,”
Try doing ’em both at once!
There’s a lot of polish on the script and score of Death: The
Musical, but Pocket’s version, directed by Regis Allison, is so
rough around the edges it could use another week of rehearsals. All the
shows at Pocket Sandwich Theatre are done on the cheap; this is Dallas’
only for-profit theater, and they spare all expense when it comes to
production values. But this time the scenery is especially ugly-saggy.
Unimaginative lighting turns the actors ghostly pale even before their
characters’ demises. Costumes are a hodgepodge of ape-armed suits and
puckered seams. On opening night, all sorts of odd techie bits went
awry, including a misbehaving follow-spot, a microphone that dropped
from the ceiling barely missing an actress’ noggin, and a scrim curtain
that got caught halfway down and hung there askew as actors tried to
duck and dodge around it. With such great material to work with, it’s a
shame they couldn’t do a better job of showcasing it.
Most of the cast also lacks professional gloss. Tony Martin
and wife Sara Shelby-Martin are the pros, hitting every note and
landing every laugh line. Nabors is good, too, though it’s hard to hear
her un-miked voice at times, even in the intimate setting. Same goes
for the thin singing of young Jad B. Saxton as the ingénue.
Loree Westbrooks has some broad moments as the bawdy maid. The rest of
the ensemble is enthusiastic but almost painfully amateurish, often
breaking out of character to laugh at their own missteps (a theatrical
sin the Brits call “corpsing”).
Still, there’s a lot of lively fun in this thanatopsy-turvy
musical. View before expiration date.
Dead Man’s Cell Phone is dead on arrival at Fort
Worth’s Stage West. Playwright Sarah Ruhl is part of that
over-praised new generation of East Coast women playmakers (count
Theresa Rebeck and Lynn Nottage in the sorority) who grabs onto a
gimmicky hook and hangs two acts’ worth of conversation on it.
This one does open with a promising premise. A lonely 39-year-old
woman named Jean (played by Dana Schultes with one blank facial
expression) grows increasingly bothered by the ringing cell phone of a
stranger, Gordon Gottlieb (Michael Corolla), who’s sitting alone in a
deserted New York café. When she approaches to ask why he’s
ignoring the rings, she discovers Gordon’s a stiff, held upright in his
seat by some early stage of rigor mortis. The phone rings again, and
Jean flips it open. “Hello?” Pause as she holds a spoon to his lips to
see if he’s breathing. “No, he’s not. Can I take a message?”
And with that, Jean wanders down the rabbit hole of Gordon’s life.
She meets his nearest and dearest, including an overbearing mother
(Sylvia Luedtke, wearing a gray wig so shiny it looks like a steel
helmet), unhappy wife Hermia (Emily Scott Banks), spaced-out brother
Dwight (Dan Forsythe) and a mistress (Elizabeth Van Winkle-Haberkorn).
All that’s in the first act, which follows a believable, if meandering,
path that seems to suggest we are all one ringy-dingy away from having
our lives autopsied by strangers.
Everything goes surreally wonky in the second act as Jean discovers
how Gordon made a living. Not a good guy. And he says as much in a
12-minute monologue delivered by the dead man.
Ruhl abandons all vestige of logic after that. Jean becomes party to
a bizarre organ-swapping scheme that culminates in a fist-fight (badly
choreographed) in a Johannesburg airport. Then she dies, comes back to
life and is reunited with Dwight, who seduces her with embossed
stationery. There is also ice dancing.
Two hours of mordant, metaphysical mumbo-jumbo—”When everyone
has their cell phones on, no one is there,” Jean muses. “It’s like
we’re all disappearing the more we’re there”—Dead Man’s Cell
Phone is not nearly as well-crafted as Ruhl’s previous dark comedy
about facing death, The Clean House, which Stage West produced
last season. This newer one never shakes off the tone of an extended
eulogy. Director Jim Covault doesn’t help by pacing the show so
lethargically a nap not only provides an escape from the dull hum of
the play, it’s inevitable. The audience should get a wake-up call when
it’s time to go home.
