A Gentlemans Guide to Love and Marriage Reviews
Theater Review
Bumping Off Kin, a Vocal in Your Heart
- A Admirer's Guide to Beloved and Murder
- NYT Critic's Choice
- Broadway, Musical
- 2 hrs. and 20 min.
- Endmost Date:
- Walter Kerr Theater, 219 W. 48th St.
- 877-250-2929
Serial killers may exist all the rage on bookshelves and television screens — and so ubiquitous, you'd remember they fabricated up a major demographic of the world population — but they are insufficiently rare in the peppier precincts of musical theater. At present, after a long dry spell, Broadway has a deadly sociopath to call its own. Please give a hearty welcome to Monty Navarro, the conniving killer who helps turn murder most foul into entertainment virtually merry in the new musical "A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder."
Despite the high torso count, this delightful testify volition lift the hearts of all those who've been pining for what sometimes seems a lost art form: musicals that match streams of memorable melody with fizzily witty turns of phrase. Bloodlust hasn't sung so sweetly, or provided so much theatrical fun, since Sweeney Todd beginning wielded his razor with gusto many a long twelvemonth ago.
The seriously squeamish needn't fear entering the Walter Kerr Theater, where this frolicsome operetta opened on Sunday night. Although our antihero, played with brash innocence lightly sprinkled with arsenic by Bryce Pinkham, eventually piles upwards a stack of corpses to rival that of honey sometime Mr. Todd, he'southward a much cuddlier fellow. A gentleman indeed, whose only wish is to secure his fortune by bumping off a few inconvenient relatives in Edwardian England.
Since these spoiled sprigs on the family tree are mostly stuffed shirts or stuffed skirts — and are all played by the dazzling Jefferson Mays — you'll be laughing too hard to shed a tear for whatsoever of them. (Those looking for fresh holiday amusement for the family unit should know there's zilch here to affright children.)
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Mr. Mays won a Tony Laurels for playing multiple roles in the Pulitzer Prize-winning solo bear witness "I Am My Ain Wife," only the chameleonic performance he gives hither makes fifty-fifty that feat seem unproblematic — a affair of filing your nails while whistling "Edelweiss," say. In a true tour de forcefulness that is inappreciably probable to be bettered on Broadway this flavour (apologies to the magnificent Mark Rylance, and those two knights, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, performing Beckett and Pinter in repertory), Mr. Mays sings, dances, water ice-skates, bicycles and generally romps through some 8 roles — flipping among personas male, female and somewhere in between — at a stride that sets your head spinning. (It'south virtually an in-joke when 1 of his doomed characters meets his end through decapitation.)
Written by Robert L. Freedman (book and lyrics) and Steven Lutvak (music and lyrics), both welcome newcomers to Broadway, "Admirer's Guide" is based on a 1907 novel by Roy Horniman. Fans of British film will recognize the plot from the classic British comedy "Kind Hearts and Coronets," which gave Alec Guinness a hazard to display his own virtuosity as a raft of British gentlefolk falling prey to an ambitious relative. Hither the mood is more farcical, the score a proficient homage to Gilbert and Sullivan, and the well-heeled family is chosen the D'Ysquiths. (That's DIE-squith, wouldn't you know.)
The penniless Monty trivial knows of his relationship to the association when we find him, in the opening scene, mourning his newly deceased mother. A visit from an old friend of hers, the nosy Miss Shingle (the excellent Jane Carr), brings startling news: The mother he knew only as a Dickensian sufferer — scrubbing floors to feed her beloved merely son — was in fact a highborn D'Ysquith, banished forever when she ran off with a Castilian, defying her family's wishes.
"And by my estimation," Miss Shingle casually adds, "only viii other relations stand between you and the current Earl of Highhurst, Lord Adalbert D'Ysquith himself."
This tempting tidbit lodges in Monty's fertile mind and begins forthwith to sow dark intentions. Monty is on the verge of losing his honey, the socially ambitious Sibella Hallward (Lisa O'Hare), to a more well-heeled man. Might she non reconsider if Monty were to plant himself as a bona fide D'Ysquith, or better yet, to hack his way through all that underbrush on the family unit tree and make it at the tippy top, condign the ninth earl of Highhurst?
Fortune favors the brave, and soon Monty — through happenstance and the occasional scrap of malicious handiwork — is rocketing upward the social scale, every bit his relatives fall victim to unhappy, ahem, accidents. Under the nicely pitched management of Darko Tresnjak — a Shakespeare specialist here making his own impressive Broadway debut — Monty'southward journey unfolds as a series of brisk comic vignettes, set to songs that honorably re-create the boisterous heyday of the English music hall and the prime of 19th-century operetta. (The mannerly set, by Alexander Dodge, features a gorgeously detailed Victorian-style stage inside a stage, and the spot-on period costumes are by Linda Cho.)
Epitome
I could make full the residue of my review with quotations from the lyrics that particularly tickled. Here's just a morsel, from ane of the prove's highlights, a comic ditty lampooning the rapacities of would-be do-gooders, in which Lady Hyacinth D'Ysquith (Mr. Mays, natch), desperate to find a new crusade to champion, lights on the opportunities in darkest Africa:
We'll civilize a village in the jungle!
Information technology can't have long to larn their mother natural language!
Of words they have only 6,
And five of them are clicks,
And all of them are dissimilar words for dung!
Mr. Lutvak and Mr. Freedman may be reworking forms that accept been previously established, primarily the patter song and the romantic carol. But their score yet establishes itself equally one of the most accomplished (and probably the most literate) to be heard on Broadway in the past dozen years or then, since the less rigorous requirements of pop songwriting take taken over.
It is beautifully sung by the rich-voiced bandage, with Mr. Pinkham treatment his heavy chores with a light touch on, his business firm tenor matched past pleasingly (and necessarily) precise wording. Ms. O'Hare plays Sibella with pertness and poise, and has a bright, clear soprano. Then, too, does the wonderful Lauren Worsham, who plays Phoebe D'Ysquith, the rival for Monty'southward heart, with a demure sweetness that never cloys. (Fortunately for Phoebe, she is not in the direct line of heirs to the D'Ysquith fortune.)
Mr. Mays is not a musical theater specialist, to be sure, which makes his accomplishment here all the more impressive. Most of his songs don't make any great demands on the tonsils (he's largely doing patter cloth), only he manages to sing in a variety of voices, distinguishing each character with a distinctive audio.
A distinctive expect and personality, too: the dazed, toothy dottiness of the Rev. Lord D'Ezekial; the buxom heartiness of Lady Hyacinth; the pompous grumpiness of the reigning Lord Adalbert; the tallyho perkiness of the brilliant-eyed beekeeper Henry (spinning along hilarious even so never vulgar double-entendres in a mock-homoerotic duet with Monty, "Better With a Man").
As each precise caricature of British snootiness or silliness comes bounding onto the stage, Mr. Mays seems to be challenging himself to elicit bigger laughs, and he about always succeeds. All just one of his characters ends up six feet under by the time this daffy, inspired musical concludes, but his vivid functioning deserves to be immortalized in Broadway lore for some time to come.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/18/theater/reviews/a-gentlemans-guide-to-love-and-murder-on-broadway.html
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