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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Comedic murder mystery pokes fun at genre

Despite its title, “The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940” doesn’t have any big song and dance numbers in it. John Bishop’s comic play, which premieres tonight at the Modern Theater Coeur d’Alene, is very nearly a parody of the murder mystery format: Its third act twists, and plot reversals come so thick and fast that the sheer insanity of the plot is itself a joke.

“It’s a classic whodunit,” said the show’s director, Heath Bingman. “There are secret passages, murders in the dark, power outages – it’s just fun. If you’re looking for something deep, this is not the show for that.”

“Musical Comedy Murders” is also a play within a play. Set in New York in the titular year, the story unfolds in a mansion as a group of quirky vaudevillians prepares a new musical variety show. Without giving much away (because there’s a lot to give away), one of the characters is murdered by a masked figure dubbed the Stage Door Slasher, and the remaining characters set out to solve the mystery.

There’s a large cast of weird personalities – the wealthy theatrical financier, the pretentious director, the fading comedian, the dysfunctional songwriting duo – and, naturally, everyone’s a suspect. As the plot runs itself in circles, we soon discover that nobody is really as they seem, and Bishop stacks reveal on top of reveal until certain characters have occupied more than one secret identity.

The show has a loose goofiness about it, but plays like “Musical Comedy Murders” have to be well-oiled machines. The actors have to always be in the right place at the right time, and make it seem effortless. And, perhaps most difficult, they have to make us laugh while they do it.

“This is my first time working closely with a farce that’s so deliberately a farce,” Bingman said. “It holds its own challenges. Actors are trained these days to find the truth, but when you say, ‘Stop all the training and just go out there and be funny,’ it’s extremely challenging.”

Bingman says the breathless pace and crazy character work has required some extra rehearsal time, which shows there’s some truth to the axiom about how dying is easy but comedy is hard. But her cast, she said, has been up to the task.

“That’s what’s been unique to this cast: a lot of dedication,” she said, noting that some of them have met on the weekends to smooth over scenes. “It’s very rare that you have a cast where the chemistry is this great. … This cast has become very tight. It’s been a blast.”

“The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940” is so knowingly zany and so comically complicated that Bingman said overseeing the show sometimes amounts to traffic direction, and that it’s often difficult to keep all the plot strands straight. But that’s part of the fun.

“We have hilarious moments in rehearsal,” she said. “We had a five-minute argument digging into the script to figure out who killed who. I almost need an assistant to keep track of the murders.”