MURDER on the Rerun sees four actors making their first appearances among the seven-strong cast at Chester Little Theatre, and it also marks the directorial debut of Charlie Núñez. Originally scheduled to direct her first production at CLT next year and also cast as Kitty in this play, Núñez has taken up the directing role at late notice for this very different sort of black comedy.
Simultaneously directing and performing in a show is a challenge that often doesn’t end well, but Núñez rises to the occasion with great style and considerable success. Her character, Kitty, is rarely offstage throughout the piece and acts as a sort of narrator, which possibly helps to make the dual role work here. She is like a gleeful puppet-master, skipping about the stage and moving the plot along with gusto.
And it is quite a plot. In this 1985 comedy, the hugely prolific playwright Fred Carmichael fuses together ideas familiar from such plays as Blythe Spirit and Heaven Can Wait. It opens as movie screenwriter Jane dies after falling down the stairs during a gathering at a Vermont ski-lodge. But we soon discover that Jane, who rises from the floor to address the audience, believes that she was murdered. She is in limbo on her way to heaven as she tries to find her killer.
It turns out that Jane had written what she believed would be her big Hollywood hit, only to be bumped off before it reached the screen. Was it her philandering husband, his starlet mistress, the great film director, a fading leading lady or a famous gossip columnist who did the deed? They all gather again in the lodge three years later, following an anonymous invitation, and their intertwined stories begin to unfold.
A ghostly Jane is accompanied by trainee angel Kitty, who hopes that solving this mystery will finally earn her the credits she needs to enter the pearly gates. Together they repeatedly stop and rewind time, rerunning events in a bid to find the truth.
The text includes numerous scenes in which the characters address the audience directly, but Jane and Kitty in particular have a great deal of this sort of narrative. Both Núñez and Saffron Hale, who plays Jane, do this seamlessly, making what is often an awkward acting technique seem fitting to the piece.
Among the remaining cast there are some good American accents and sharply judged comic performances, especially from Anne Mellows, as Edwina the columnist, and Eileen Reisin as Valerie, the leading lady who has reached her sell by date. There are echoes of Agnes Moorhead and Rue McLanahan here. Dani Tougher is flawless and perfectly cast as Betsy, the young actress with ambitions of more than one kind.
Caspar Braithwaite has the presence and bluster to carry off the big-headed film director Justin, while there is perhaps more of Columbo than Warren Beatty in John Kinsey’s matinee idol Hugh.
There are more twists and turns in the plot than there are in the ski slopes of Vermont, but this cast navigate them with barely a slip right the way to the cleverly lit finishing line.
This is an amateur production of Murder on the Rerun presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals, on behalf of Samuel French, running until Saturday 11th December.
Review by Nigel Smith
