Murder is Such a Drag

A Fine Feathered Murder: A Miss Marbled Mystery – Hell in a Handbag Productions

Hell in a Handbag is back with it’s most ambitious project that I’ve seen. In the grand tradition of Clue or Gosford Park, David Cerda and company are tackling the country manor murder mystery. All the standards are here. The society maven. The aging aristocrat. Servants with secrets. And a quiet but shrewd spinster watching everyone from behind her knitting. The only way you can be sure that you didn’t accidentally buy tickets to The Moustrap is just about all the women on stage are drag queens.

I happen to own just about every word Agatha Christie put to paper and have read both the Poirot and Marple novels and watched their TV adaptations several times. (We will not be discussing the Kenneth Branagh adaptations.) So, Handbag really drew the short straw with getting me assigned the review for this one, because I was going to watching like a hawk not just for a good show, but one that did justice to one of my favorite authors.

They nailed it.

The show was both the delightful, energetic, and irreverent farce I’ve come to expect from Hell in a Handbag, and was a pitch perfect parody of Christie’s work. This show is easily on par with other love letters to the country manor murder mystery like Gosford Park or Clue.

Director Cheryl Snodgrass must have had a difficult job. Handbag is a company known for being over the top and ridiculous in the best possible ways. But more than other parodies like Drag Seed or their long-running Golden Girls shows, this one is longer and a little more invested in its plot. There’s a fine line between not smothering the energy that makes this company special without letting it run away with the whole show. Snodgrass and the company as a whole landed the perfect balance where their exaggerated take on everything gave crackling energy to the story rather than overwhelmed it.

More than anything, this show understands that the heart of good farce is everyone on stage taking it deadly seriously. It makes the ridiculous things that will happen feel both funny but somehow still plausible inside the four walls of the story. At the center is long time Handbag member Ed Jones as Miss Marbled. By design he has to be a quiet, retiring woman who just knits while the action unfolds around her. A less confident actor would bristle at that restraint, but Jones leans in, making Marbled the most grounded character in the show, and the result is that when she cuts in a with a zinger or really cuts loose in the second act, it’s an absolute scream.

The cast is brimming with comedy gold, and it’s almost impossible to single anyone out for praise without feeling like I’m doing a disservice. David Cerda’s Lady Fowler is the perfect reluctantly aging society maven. Danne W. Taylor’s acid Dowager Countess is, like so many dowagers before her, a snark machine, handled by Taylor with truly perfect comic timing. Caitlin Jackson, who you may recognize at Bette Midler from Handbag’s “Bette, Live at the Baths” plays Miss Marbled niece and ersatz narrator, Vivienne. Sydney Genco plays Gerda, the household’s Teutonic battle axe of a maid. Both Jackson and Genco give master classes in how to milk every second on stage as a supporting actor for all its worth. Lastly, I would be guilty of theatre critic malpractice if I did not give a rave to Coco Sho-nell as rival businesswoman Treasure Abundance, sweeping in and out of the room like Diahann Carroll in an episode of Dynasty.

I don’t want to give too much away, but there is some puppet work in this show that was truly out of this world. Created by Jabberwocky Marionettes, my jaw literally dropped when it came on stage. The best way I can put it is that it was better than it needed to be. The puppet serves a running a gag, and a far more basically realized puppet and performance would have ticked the box without a problem. The puppet they built and the performance the puppeteer gave made it practically another character who I wanted to know more about.

And now that I think about it, that’s a pretty good metaphor for this show. Everything is a notch or two better than it needed to be to succeed at the goal of a loving parody of Agatha Christie. Happily, every component of the show, both on stage and off, went beyond what was merely needed to succeed. The result was not just a good parody, but a good show in itself. It achieves what I consider to be the height of good parody, where if you squint, you might think for a moment you were watching the original. Sure, in the original, it’s not all drag queens, but still.

Highly Recommended

Reviewed by Kevin Curran

Presented through July 31 by Hell in a Handbag Productions at The Chopin Theater at 1543 W. Division, Chicago.

Tickets can be purchased here.

Further information about this and other area productions can be found by visiting www.theatreinchicago.com.