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Because the Derby Dinner Playhouse experience involves more than the show, I will critique as many elements as possible.
The food? Excellent; plan on arriving as soon as the doors open to take your place in line for the Derby Buffet. The roast beef and carrots were especially good. I was tempted to try their new drink special, the Stimulus – an enticing mixture of coconut rum, Sprite, pineapple juice, and grenadine – but I knew I had a long drive home afterward on roads that were still precarious after last weekend's snowfall, so I passed.
The service? Wonderful and always with a smile; our server was attentive, friendly, polite, and on top of things. And I'm not just saying this because he happened to be a friend of mine, but running into him was a nice bonus.
The pre-show entertainment? The Footnotes sang well and gamely discharged their duty of advertising the drink and dessert specials, although the songs chosen at Saturday night's performance to preview the upcoming 8-Track: The Sounds of the '70s weren't the best showcase for their considerable talents. At the risk of slipping into unapologetic musical-theatre snobbery, I wish Derby would get out of the jukebox musical business and return to their roots in the timeless Golden-Age Broadway musicals whose pictures adorn the auditorium and lobby walls; I would be interested to see this happen for many reasons, not the least of which is so that these gifted and charismatic singers would get to sing some real showsongs every so often. Here's hoping they'll have that chance at their upcoming summer concert.
And as for the main event? Well, I have to give credit to a gleeful and hard-working cast of comic actors for carrying the night, and the audience seemed to be genuinely enjoying themselves, so maybe it was just me. By intermission of Death and Taxes, I couldn't help thinking, "Well, this is exactly what the world needs: yet another virtually plotless, pseudo-satirical farce about a tiny unidentified stereotypically Southern town populated exclusively by what else but colorful and eccentric (read: cartoonish) yokels!" On the other hand, it's entirely possible that not a single person in attendance on Saturday night managed to catch Greater Tuna or its Christmas-themed sequel at Actors Theatre or Dearly Departed at Bunbury last year.
At some point during Act Two, however, I found myself getting into it. The author, Pat Cook, has shrewdly distinguished Death and Taxes by structuring it as a murder-mystery; none of the above ever did that. I myself have both seen and performed in mystery plays with Whodunnit Murder Mystery Theatre, so I have some experience with this sort of thing. And although I am always terrible at solving mysteries, the mechanics of how this crime was committed are vaguely fascinating, and go a long way toward keeping interest in between corny punch lines. Of course, it's all designed to showcase the essentially one-joke premise of the eight Hendricks Town Council Members and their respective quirks, but you get too into it to think about how slight the whole thing is.
I was confused at first by the set. The in-the-round Derby stage features a faux finish of wooden planks, and athletic championship banners hang from the flies above, suggesting a high school gymnasium, yet the furniture includes a sofa and coffee table with a full chess set, and is configured in a way that suggests a private residence.
The reason for these mixed signals becomes clear early on; we are indeed in a high school "auditorium" – and in a tiny hick town like Hendricks, that means "gym" – where the Town Council is meeting to figure out why an IRS man named Geoffrey Polk (or is he?) was found dead in the living room of Carl and Mattie Johansen, and the furniture represents a "reasonable facsimile" of the crime scene.
The Council is made up of the unpopular incumbent Mayor (Tina Jo Wallace in a wig that lends her a frightening resemblance to Sarah Palin), her dim-witted steno (broadly funny Michelle Johnson), a Barney Fife-type sheriff (rubber-faced Bill Hanna), the local busybody (Rita Thomas in an unusual straight-man role), a sleazy newspaper reporter (Cary Wiger), the bickering couple who owns the couch on which Polk was found (David Myers and Debbie King-Raque), and the zany local doctor (J.R. Stuart).
These eight chronically mistrustful hayseeds spend a great deal of time (though, significantly, not as long as it seems) mugging, pointing fingers, and generally bitching at each other while a killer is on the loose. Yeah, these are exactly the people you want impaneling themselves as a "Coroner's Jury" in a murder case!
When the most competent person in the room is Sarah Palin, you know you're in trouble. Fortunately for them, a more capable detective is waiting in the all-too-literal wings, in the form of Mr. Martindale (Matt Wallace), the slightly gay high school drama instructor who has directed murder mystery plays at the school and so of course he feels qualified to supervise a reenactment of the events leading up to the murder and solve the case.
The whole cast is fine playing over-the-top Southern caricatures, but Matt Wallace, Tina Jo's real-life husband and a comic actor I've admired ever since I saw his foppish and indomitable Benedick in Kentucky Shakespeare's 2003 Much Ado About Nothing, stands out in my memory because his Martindale at least seemed somewhat real to me.
Bill Hanna, J.R. Stuart, and Michelle Johnson also score with high energy and the various quirks they've put into their characters. I especially love how Hanna's bungling Sheriff Thorne keeps mistaking the occasional fancy word for a dirty or disrespectful one.
As far as I could tell, the answer to the mystery seems to be scripted and constant; the audience doesn't get to "vote," per se, on which character will be revealed as the killer, but they do have a chance to guess. Unlike at Whodunnit, however, where the guessing is by secret ballot-style "solution cards," here it's done by show of applause, and there is no prize for guessing correctly except maybe bragging rights among your friends.
This is low comedy of the same degree as the aforementioned productions, but unlike the Tuna plays, which I found overrated and filled with genuinely unpleasant characters, Death and Taxes at least has nothing to offend. The only content that might so much as raise the eyebrows of those who really want to find something objectionable is the similarity to the Bill Sparkman incident that happened right here in Kentucky last fall. I don't think this was intended, so go ahead and consider this an evening of joyful escapism; after all, who doesn't need an escape right now?
Come to think of it, the more I sit here writing about this play, the more it begins to sound like one I might have enjoyed more if I'd gone ahead and ordered that Stimulus!
- Reviewed by Cory Vaughn
Entire contents are copyright © 2010 Cory Vaughn. All rights reserved.
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Derby Dinner Playhouse presents
DEATH AND TAXES
by PAT COOK
Produced and Directed by BEKKI JO SCHNEIDER
Derby Dinner Playhouse
525 Marriott Drive
Clarksville, Indiana 47129
812-288-8281
Continuing through February 14, 2009
Tickets:
Tuesday-Thursday and Sunday Evening: $38.00 (Groups $34.00)
derbydinner.com
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Theatre Lou.