MUSICAL Murder for Two ★★★★★ By Kellen Blair & Joe Kinosian, Hayes Theatre Co, Arts Centre Melbourne, until September 2 This off-Broadway musical whodunnit is pure comic delight. Packing an Agatha Christie-like drawing room mystery into a two-hander, Murder for Two stands ready to unleash an evening of criminally entertaining musical comedy on unsuspecting audiences. Maverick Newman and Gabbi Bolt are the perfect pairing in Murder for Two.
Credit: Mark Gambino In tone and style, the sheer loveable camp of it reminded me of another off-Broadway success story, The Drowsy Chaperone – the kind of irresistibly silly homage that production offered to a bygone age of American musical theatre, this one devotes to the classic murder mystery. Humorous contrasts abound, and much of the comic plenitude proceeds from onstage parsimony. Murder for Two uses just two performers to play a detective (Gabbi Bolt) and a roomful of suspects (Maverick Newman) with multifarious motives, in a story bursting at the seams with MacGuffins and femmes fatales and second murders and surprise twists and every other well-worn genre trope you can think of.
The murder victim is well-known novelist Arthur Whitney, whose fiction was inspired by the dirty laundry of his intimates. It would seem to give everyone hiding in the dark at his surprise birthday party a reason to kill him – his narcissistic southern belle wife, his ice-cold prima ballerina mistress, his dodgy psychiatrist (complete with ba.