With 1949’s Clue, toy manufacturer titans Parker Brothers (now Hasbro) created a board game that demanded the winner apply logical reasoning skills within a film noir sensibility.
It’s no surprise that Clue the game eventually spawned “Clue” the movie, “Clue” the musical and “Clue” the comedic stage play, the last of which is running through Jan. 1 in a breakneck, 90-minute production at Southport Corridor’s Mercury Theater.
Unlike Monopoly or Parcheesi, playing Clue meant the chance to “become” a game character as you moved your token through a nine-room cardboard mansion rife with secret passages. There is the siren Miss Scarlett, the pompous Professor Plum, the vaguely Teddy Roosevelt-esque Colonel Mustard, the enigmatic Mrs. White, the fussy and buttoned-up Mrs. Peacock, and the possibly devious Mr. Green. Anyone of them could be a murderer. The game was about figuring out who actually was.
The theatrical possibilities were endless, which the game encouraged with tiny props, dollhouse-sized versions of a knife, lead pipe, rope, gun, wrench and a candlestick that seemed thrilling compared to Monopoly’s old shoe and weird hat.
Written by Sandy Rustin and adapted from the Paramount screenplay by Jonathan Lynn, “Clue” the play (additional material by Hunter Foster and Eric Price) is a scattershot farce peopled by characters about as deep as a very shallow grave.
Director L. Walter Stearns has an ensemble that absolutely commits to the inanity, even when the script itself starts to make The Three Stooges sound like they are spouting Tom Stoppard by comparison. In this story, the guiding sensibility is “more is more.” If one pratfall is funny, five are five times as funny. If shrieking at 10 decibels is funny, everybody screaming at 10 times the volume is hilarious.
There is no pretense at an original plot. We open on a dark and stormy night in a set-up that’s as much reminiscent of the play “The Mousetrap” as it is of the board game Clue. Our host for a dinner-party that will soon become a crime scene is Wadsworth (Mark David Kaplan), a butler character not featured in the board game.
With a voice that’s part Bela Lugosi and part Peter Lorre but also wholly its own creation, Kaplan’s Wadsworth eerily welcomes the evening’s color-coded denizens. Miss Scarlett (Erica Stephan) exudes femme fatale sensuality. Jonah Winston’s open-hearted Colonel Mustard is hilariously dim, his misapprehensions providing the show’s comic high points.
As Mrs. White, McKinley Carter is as somber as a tomb, except when the five-times widowed woman wails into the void about flames eating her face. Professor Plum (Andrew Jessop) seems about as erudite as someone who has taken a significant, untreated blow to the head. Mrs. Peacock (Nancy Wagner) is as prim and fussy as your great-great aunt with the plastic-covered furniture. Kelvin Roston Jr.’s Mr. Green exudes unassuming charm as an Everyman trapped in a mansion where the bodies soon start piling up faster than last week’s trading stamps.
Who is doing the killing, in the end, doesn’t matter because the script stops being a cohesive story about midway through, almost as if someone decided writing a remotely credible mystery was too much work. There are countless double-takes alongside intentional over-the-top moments of sinister foreshadowing about as subtle as a slo-mo crashing chandelier.
That said, this cockamamie plot salad showcases just what “ensemble” actually means in this town. This group — which also includes Tiffany T. Taylor as a squeaky maid and Honey West as a cook with a fine command of the cleaver — works like an airtight chamber orchestra, only each person is a one-person band. If you must sit through not one, not two but three scenes that have gone full-on “Weekend At Bernie’s,” you want it to be with this hugely talented ensemble.
There’s a play to be found in Clue, the game. There are six characters, six murder weapons, nine rooms and 324 possible murder scenarios. “Clue” the play makes the most of precisely none of them.
