Old Globe staging Kinosian and Blair's playful detective musical
by James Hebert
A
musical comedy that crams multiple characters and settings and songs
into a streamlined two-man production demands a similarly pithy,
stripped-down mission statement.
So
here’s one that’s made to fit “Murder for Two,” which hits the Old
Globe Theatre next week: “What if the Marx Brothers performed an Agatha
Christie play?”
Those are
the words of “Murder for Two” co-writer/lyricist Kellen Blair, who’s
speaking of the conceptual breakthrough he and composer and fellow
writer Joe Kinosian had when they were brainstorming ideas for the show.
What
developed was a kind of musical deconstruction of the detective genre,
with one actor playing the gumshoe and the other playing all the myriad
suspects. (And both playing the piano.)
“Murder”
premiered to acclaim in Chicago in 2011, then had off-Broadway runs at
two separate theaters in 2013. (Old Globe artistic director Barry
Edelstein recalls “seeing it in New York and smiling until my face
hurt.”)