Musical The Comedy Murders of 1940

F irst of all, let's get some things straight.

>> Seated: Carla Grieve. Standing lethally (from left): Jim Heffernan Jr., Lucy Harris and Brad Goetz "The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940" is a comedy.

It does include murder.

And yes, it's set in 1940.

It is not, however, a musical. "It's a spoof," says Megan McCombs, who's directing the Naples Players' production of the play. "It has a little of that film noir to it, but it's a spoof of that."

The play by John Bishop is about people in a musical auditioning at the home of their wealthy backer. The last how they were in was cut short when the Stage Door Slasher murdered three chorus girls. As their audition progresses, the actors begin to realize the Slasher might still be in their midst.

Dot Auchmoody, the Players' resident costume designer/costume shop supervisor, describes it as "very slap-sticky."

"It's just fun," Ms. Auchmoody says. "It's not meant to be taken seriously. It reminds me a little bit of 'Clue.' It's just a hoot."

The show runs at the Sugden Community Theatre through Dec. 20.

Jim Heffernan Jr. and Laura Lorusso in "The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940" The theater is advertising it as a "comic romp (not a musical)" — not a bad selection during a time when people are longing for escapism.

The characters consist of all kinds of theatrical stereotypes, including the vain actor, preening director and drunken lyricist. They're such stereotypes, they're easy to costume.

"You have to condense it down to a look that personifies that type of person," Ms. Auchmoody says. "You've got to shrink it down to one essential look, so they come out of the door and boom! you know who these people are.

"There is no great depth or meaning to anybody there."

Director Ms. McCombs describes them as "stock characters that are pretty funny. It's an absurd situation. All these characters with some Nazis thrown in. What could be better?"

You don't have to necessarily be a theater buff to enjoy it, she says. "Theater people are just fun to make fun of. And theater people love to portray theater people (on stage.)" That's probably because they enjoy making fun of themselves and each other. "We've all worked with the vain stars and the temperamental people. It's fun to make fun of ourselves."

COURTESY PHOTO Lucy Harris and Brad Goetz But don't let the laughs fool you; comedy is hard work.

"It is always a question of finding the style and also not going too far," says Ms. McCombs, who has a highly developed sense of humor herself. "It's very possible in this play to go beyond.

"Comedy is a rather delicate business, actually. You know that old adage that dying is easy, but comedy is hard. That's because it's very technical.

"So when you find where the funny is, you've got to be very clear with it and deliver it properly. There's also a take, or an aftermath, to it. There's all of that."

Paradoxically, it takes a gentle touch. Though their characters are outrageous, they have to send the jokes out with a degree of delicacy to make them work, Ms. McCombs explains. It's difficult, because the actors tend to want to be heavyhanded.

"But that's not the style; it's not really a skit," she says. "It's not like 'The Carol Burnett Show,' which was what I'd call over-the-top comedy. We love 'The Carol Burnett Show,' it's really funny. But the whole idea of a skit or a comedy show… is built more on a vaudevillian style of acting.

"This is a spoof, so you want to find who the character types are, and you want to play it as organically as possible within the style of the piece."

Ms. McCombs knows firsthand how to get a laugh, having acted and directed at the Hilton Head Playhouse and the Arts Center of Coastal Carolina. (She also directs the Players' KidzAct program, a job for which a sense of humor is esssential.)

"When I was young and traveling, I worked on comedy," she says. "And what I found was … that I could walk across the stage and deliver a line straight out, and it wouldn't get a laugh. But if I walked down and turned around, it would get a laugh.

"Now why that is, I can't tell you," she adds. "But it has something to do with physical positioning, it has something to do with turning on the punch. It has something to do with timing. It has to do with the reaction of the people on stage. That's the reason why they have straight people and comedic people. The straight people react, they help the laugh in a way. The dry take is part of what makes a joke funny. And then the take in itself becomes funny."

"The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940" does contain some broad comedy, as well as some physical comedy. There are times when characters go over the top, but then have to come back down to stay within the genre of the piece.

"Even a farce is not mayhem all the time," Ms. McCombs says. "(The energy has) to come back down, so it can go back up again."

Comedy is a serious business, she says. They peruse the script, asking themselves: How do we make this funny?

"It's a discovery process," she says. "Some things are obviously funny when you read the script. And then you can read something and know that there's probably a laugh in this little area, and how do we set this up to coax the laugh out of this little moment?

"How can the ridiculous behavior grow as it goes along, that it heightens the humor in the piece as the characters begin to get more out of control. That's sort of serious. You have to look at it and say, how are we doing this?"

The actors also come up with ideas, she says: "'Can I do this?' 'Can I crawl under that?' 'How about if we do it this way?' It makes it a lot of fun."

Some jokes were discovered when the actors began wearing their costumes. For example, one actor recently walked on stage wearing a mink coat and carrying a shovel. "The juxtaposition of the mink coat and the shovel was very funny," Ms. McCombs says. "Now is the audience always going to laugh at it? I don't know, but we fell over when we saw it, because it was a visual that had not occurred to us before.

"When she was walking around in her rehearsal clothes, we weren't envisioning a mink coat on her. But there it was, and suddenly it was a funny visual."

Sometimes the cast is surprised by what an audience finds funny, and no doubt more jokes will be discovered when the show opens Wednesday, Nov. 26, and there's an audience.

But right now, during rehearsal and without an audience to respond, the cast has to "keep the faith that what they're doing is true to the play and true to the situation, and that they're all within the same style of funny," Ms. McCombs says.

"That's the main thing. If you want to keep them all in the same play, they have to be in the same style of funny. Everyone has a different sense of humor, everybody has a different energy level. To get them to begin to work as a whole and to be in the same style is one of the great challenges of (directing) comedies."

To accomplish that, she says, the cast has to trust her, and trust that when she tells them to pull back on something, she knows what she's doing. They have to trust that she has a good eye. And they have to really listen to each other.

"When they begin to listen to each other, when the play begins to get its rhythm, they can feel it," she says. "And when they feel that, they can begin to get a sense if they go out of it, if they suddenly get too big or off the mark. It's jarring."

Ms. Auchmoody calls the play the "perfect no-brainer show for these difficult economic times."

Ms. McCombs just wants audiences to leave their disbelief at home and sit back and laugh. A lot.

if you go

"The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940" >>When: through Dec. 20 (no performance on Thanksgiving) >>Where: The Sugden Community Theatre, 701 Fifth Avenue S., Naples >>Cost: $30 for adults, $10 for students >>Information: Call 263-7990 or go to www.NaplesPlayers.org