Ron Pederson in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
Oscar Derkx in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudrea
Murder most foul?
Yes, we laughed and laughed. How can you not be tickled by an evening of inspired wickedness in the theatre where you find yourself charmed by a serial killer, and overcome with mirth at the assorted demises of his victims?
Don’t even try to wipe the smile off your face when you see Grindstone Theatre’s lethal musical comedy sparkler A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder, at the Orange Hub. The mortality rate is awfully high in the 2014 multiple Tony Award winner by Robert L. Freedman and Steven Lutvak — a clever faux-Edwardian concoction inspired by the same 1907 novel that also inspired the Alex Guinness film Kind Hearts and Coronets. It tips its chapeau to the English music hall, to the sophisticated shrewdness of Noel Coward, to the multi-syllabic daffiness of Gilbert and Sullivan. O death, where is thy sting?
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In a performance of sublime comic bravado, nimbleness, and ingenuity, Ron Pederson dies eight times in the show, as nearly all the aristocratic D’Ysquiths (say “Die-Squith” of course)— a gallery of inbred upper-class twits, snobs, buffoons, and grotesques. It is a true tour de force, perfectly suited to the rather breath-taking multiple talents of Pederson.
I say ‘nearly’ all the D’Ysquiths. BUT, there’s a D’Ysquith Pederson doesn’t get to play. The dispatching of the heirs, one after the other, is done by the forgotten D’Ysquith, the one no one, including him, saw coming. Penniless Montague Navarro is a distant and disinherited relative living in worthy poverty at the outset, who sets out to off every D’Ysquith who stands between him and the title of ninth Earl of Highhurst.
Oscar Derkx in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau.
Oscar Derkx, a comic actor of finesse and impeccable timing, is a charmer as the disconcertingly adorable Monty. The show doesn’t work if he isn’t disarming.
Monty’s grievances, and murderous campaign, begin when he finds out in a chance encounter with one of her friends (Ruth Alexander, riotously jaunty as Miss Shingle) that his mother was of noble birth, cruelly banished by the family when she ran off with a Castilian (and worse: a Castilian who was also a musician). And so the blood-letting begins. I’m very partial to the New York Times description from years ago that it’s as if Sweeney Todd were written by P.G. Wodehouse. Derkx delivers the very funny song Poison In My Pocket with a sense of discovery that will crack you up.
Sam Hutchings, Oscar Derkx, Sawyer Craig in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau
Monty has not one but two love interests, a romantic complication which escalates as the death count rises along with his fortunes. And both women are perfectly cast in Martin’s production: Sam Hutchings as the sexy social-climbing vixen Sibella and Sawyer Craig as the sweetly daffy Phoebe D’Ysquith. Derkx knows exactly what to do with a romantic ballad. And both Hutchings and Craig are impressive singers, with contrasting soprano voices, the one floating pure musical theatre top notes, and the other trilling away operatically. Monty, Sibella, and Phoebe get a delish operetta trio, I’ve Decided To Marry You, staged as a farcical scene between two doors as Monty scrambles acrobatically to keep his squeezes apart.
Kudos to the ensemble — tourists, mourners, servants, cops — which includes both seasoned performers like Cathy Derkach (a riot as the snorting dragon Lady D’Asquith) and recent theatre school grads, all of whom tuck into the tone and style, both musical and spoken, with comic gravitas.
Ron Pederson in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau.
The music, played expertly by the first-rate seven-member pit band led by the invaluable musical director/ sound designer Simon Abbott, is complicated. Pederson sings intricately rhymed patter songs, and more Coward-ly musical provocations, in a range of crystalline blue-blood accents (the razzle-dazzle lyrics by Lutvak and Freedman are one of the delights of the evening). Pederson dances, he bends, he seems to change height, weight, and age at will … all at top speed. He exits as one outrageous D’Ysquith and enters, re-costumed and re-constituted, as another — a demented cleric, a fey beekeeper, a eugenicist body-builder in a pith helmet…. The blustering present Earl, Lord Adalburt D’Ysquith, is the most obnoxious of all. His song I Don’t Understand the Poor, complete with chorus (“to be so debased/ is in terrible taste….”) is G&S satire of the highest calibre.
Ron Pederson in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau.
One of my favourites, and it turns out one of the hardest to dispatch, is Hyacinth D’Ysquith, a career philanthropist/ narcissist, voraciously combing through the British Empire for a cause after her campaign on behalf of imbeciles and idiots goes bust. “We’ll find ourselves some lepers in the Punjab…”
Ron Pederson in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau.
But as a theatre lover, you may also bestow your particular favour on the family thespian Salomé D’Ysquith, in a hilariously disastrous performance as Hedda Gabler. Her exit proves fatal, a matter of real bullets in the stage gun. Killed, yes, as the culprit admits in his diary, before she could be slaughtered by the critics. The deaths and the death scenes stage managed by Monty are riotously à propos.
This elaborately daft material cries out for a creative hand in stage lunacy to match. Which is what it gets from the musical theatre-savvy director Martin. Sight gags abound, along with amusing tableaux. All this chipper death and destruction happens in a red-velvet curtain-draped vaudeville theatre within a theatre. The designer is Chelsea Payne Evason; the locale changes are assisted by projections. And speaking of changes, which in Pederson’s case happen at a hectic pace, everything is assisted by Lieke Den Bakker’s profusion of apt and witty costumes. The nuttiness knows no bounds.
A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder is the finale (and most ambitious) production of Grindstone’s enterprising premiere mainstage season of full-sized musicals, produced on a scale at the Orange Hub. And they’re killin’ it with this therapeutic comic mayhem. Give your laugh muscles a work-out before they atrophy, times being what they are.
REVIEW
A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder
Theatre: Grindstone
Written by: Robert L. Freedman (book) and Steven Lutvak (music), Freedman and Lutvak (lyrics)
Directed by: Byron Martin
Starring: Ron Pederson, Oscar Derkx, Sam Hutchings, Sawyer Craig, Ruth Alexander, Aniqa Charania, Cathy Derkach, David Michael Juma, Max Fingerote, Tana Bumhira, Zakary Matsuba
Where: Orange Hub, 10045 156 St.
Running: through June 1
Tickets: grindstonetheatre.ca
