LOGAN – As performed by the thespians of Music Theatre West, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder is a smart, funny musical comedy about a ne’er-do-well killing his way to the top ranks of English aristocracy and – surprise, surprise – getting away with it.
Moreover, the singing in the show that opened Feb. 20 at the Utah Theatre will absolutely knock your sox off.
It was the opportunity to put on that dazzling vocal display that first attracted director Celeste Baillio to A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, a 2012 musical by the Broadway team of Robert Freedman and Steven Lutvak.
The production is a contemporary play with a strictly modern sense of graveyard humor set in Edwardian England and a score that ranges from classic Broadway to the operatic. But Baillio was able to assemble a gifted cast of vocalists who are thoroughly up to that challenge.
While delighting in its grim subject matter, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder is good clean fun and is played with such refinement that the audience is totally charmed even while murders are being committed left and right.
Jon Rash, a veteran performer and director for the Four Seasons Theatre Company in Smithfield, ably fills the role of our hero (?) Monty Navarro, a scheming cad determined to claim his rightful place in high society as Earl of Highhurst even if he has to kill everybody who stands in his way.
Monty has plenty of motivation for the killing spree – his mother was cruelly disinherited by her prudish family for marrying for love rather than social standing. Even so, Rash goes about his work with a single-minded, gleeful abandon that quickly infects the audience.
It helps, of course, that Monty’s victims are such typically English snobs that no one even bothers to investigate their supposedly accidental deaths – until he is accused of poisoning a well-meaning cousin, the only crime of which Monty is ironically innocent.
Quick-change artist Clifton Richards plays the entire D’Ysquith family – both men and women – who fall victim to Monty’s clandestine reign of terror. He’s particularly good as a Boer War veteran who makes the mistake of inviting Monty for dinner, but all his characterization are convincingly zany.
But it’s the ladies in the cast who do all the heavy lifting vocally.
Rachel Duffin Fillingim is sensational as the devious Sibella Hallward, a gold-digging clotheshorse who marries for money and wants to still continue playing with Monty on the side.
Along his bloody path, Monty also meets and falls in love with Phoebe D’Ysquith, played by the winsome Baylie Hendry, who he is delighted to find is not in the line of succession to the Highhurst estates.
Both women play their roles beautifully and their singing is simply out-of-this world.
Also performing a multitude of roles, the choral ensemble of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder includes Amber Miller, Laur Kian, Kennady Pulsipher, Kyle Cottom, Alec Finley, Kyle Heywood, Tori Turner, Melissa Hamilton and Aaron Lacey.
The production’s set by Danny Rash and Lineset Design is enhanced by inventive projections by Brodie Brower. The best of those is a vertigo-inducing montage that simulates Monty and the Rev. Ezekial D’Ysquith climbing to the top of a church tower, from which the cleric “accidently” falls.
The elaborately Edwardian costuming designed by Maren Lyman is lavish, particularly when it comes to deliciously draping Ms. Fillingim and Ms. Hendry in numerous gorgeous gowns.
Hats off also to the backstage dressers who made Richards’ rapid-fire costume changes possible.
Performances of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder are slated to continue through Saturday, Mar. 7.
All performances will be staged in the Utah Theatre at 18 West Center Street in downtown Logan.