A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder excels at murder most entertaining

by Drew Rowsome - Photos y Marc Lemyre

The sumptuous curtains of a jewel box theatre, complete with seashell floorlights, part and a Gothic cast of characters admonish the audience that what is about to transpire is dire and dark and amoral, best to leave now. The choral warning is just a comic prelude to a giddy mix of pitch-black comedy, operetta and eye-popping staging. Monty Navarro is writing his memoirs, A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, from a prison cell, and he regales the audience with the tale of how he claimed his dubiously rightful inheritance by gleefully murdering all who stood in his way.

Kevin Massey, who plays Monty, has a conspiratorial wink that pops through the fourth wall and invites, and implicates, the audience into the fun of familial slaughter. Merely arching an eyebrow brings down the house. The victims are all played by John Rapson in a series of rapid-fire costume changes, distinctive and eccentric speech patterns, a thick layering of innuendo and nary a wink until the very end. Rapson creates, with seemingly virtuositic ease, a priest, a dowager, an army major, a theatrical diva, a fey cousin (borderline offensive but very funny) and a few surprises, 

All the victims die in unique, hilarious and mildly Grand Guignol fashions courtesy of the third star of A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder: a stunningly versatile set that makes use of projections, video, split-second timing and considerable wit, to create multiple settings and gloriously grotesque deaths. To describe any, or how they are achieved, would be a spoiler worthy of being the next to be dispatched. The bodies pile up, and the laughs pile on top of each other, so quickly that the first act leaves the audience dizzy with delirious laughter. 

At first listen the music seems undistinguished (the lyrics are uniformly witty and crisply delivered) but an earworm had lodged in my head, one that I hummed and then overheard three other audience members turning over in their larynxes. There are no splashy musical numbers with sing-along choruses, but the gravity of the recitative and soaring notes (including an impossible falsetto from Rapson) provides a necessary counterpoint to balance out the silliness and gore. 

The second act starts strong with a show-stopping set piece involving a set of doors cribbed from a classic French force, but is unable to sustain the frothy - comic and jugular - momentum that drives the first act. Though the two points of the love triangle - Kristen Beth Williams as a calculating cool blonde radiating heat, and Adrienne Eller as the sweet brunette with lust in her heart - are both delightful and have moments of delicious deviousness, the stakes are not high enough to keep the audience engaged. A final punchline almost saves the day but the damage has been done, what was brilliant is now just very good. 

To have us side with Navarro, the family members are pompous and stuffed to bursting with noblesse oblige. Asquith D'Asquith Jr (Rapson in fine voice) sings "I Don't Understand the Poor" - containing the delectable couplet "To be so debased/Is in terrible taste" - and the audience is invited to savour the revenge of the 1%. It's not that simple of course and the lack of morals becomes the grisly heartbeat of the show (it is the sheer absence of scruples that is the basis of the attraction between Navarro and the slinky but ice cold Sibella in the dominant love story). But I doubt anyone was too bothered with fuzzy politics and fluffy satire, personally I was too entranced, caught up in the buoyant joy of murder most entertaining on a scale that would give even Jessica Fletcher pause.