The show features an ideal comic pairing with Blake Nawa’a and Brandon Bill
When your musical comedy has only two people in it, you’d better find two damned funny actors with great chemistry between them. In the case of Murder for Two, director Julia Tobey hits a grand slam with Blake Nawa’a and Brandon Bill, now playing at Parker’s Schoolhouse theatre in a show produced by Tobey’s Give 5 Productions.
The 2011 show is a whodunit, with Nawa’a playing a New England cop named Marcus Moscowicz investigating the murder of a famous novelist. Bill plays all the suspects, ranging from a sultry French ballerina and the deceased’s widow to a psychiatrist and … a bunch of others. It’s hard not to think of Laurel and Hardy when watching the slim Nawa’a and the more portly Bill as the two play off one another in a high-speed laugh fest that includes both of them banging away on a piano up right — often at the same time. The would-be detective Marcus is the straight man to the many bonkers characters Bill is playing, and they’re not at all averse to engaging the audience at times (and beware: you may be dragged on stage).
‘Murder for Two’ gets its own highly specialized promo art outside the theatre.
Tobey’s skillful management of the action is as much direction as it is choreography, with the two men engaging in a fluid, fast-paced pas de deux that’s really quite impressive. Bill is a highly experienced stage actor who brings every ounce of his experience to creating the many characters he’s charged with portraying. As opposed to something like The Mystery of Irma Vep, another multi-character two-hander where there are many costume changes, Bill stays on stage the whole time and only does a couple of simple tweaks to his look. When he switches to the attention-hound, barely grieving widow Dahlia Whitney, he has a pair of glasses hanging from an ornate chain to accompany her high-pitched Southern drawl. The only quick changes he’s concerned with is transitioning from one character to another with seamless precision — and he really pulls it off.
For a big man, Bill is light on his feet and absolutely fearless as a comic actor. He’s a ton of fun to watch, with the audience bracing itself for whatever batshit schtick is coming next.
Nawa’a is a full-time musician by trade, and it shows when he takes over the keyboard running up and down the keys. But he’s got a solid speaking voice and a firm stage presence as the trying-so-hard wannabe detective that’s a perfect foil for Bill’s comic flamboyance. He’s also juggling interactions on the phone with his boss, the sheriff, and his unseen police partner Lou stationed outside the house.
Ricocheting between Vaudevillian goofiness and whodunit sendups, Murder for Two also has a great deal of its own unique character. It’s downright weird in some places and in others just slapstickin’ for laughs. I’ve seen things like it on stage before, but creatively it truly stands on its own. The audience I was part of seemed to enjoy it immensely, and the black-box setup in The Schoolhouse was a perfect blank slate for a show that needed plenty of room to roam.
If you haven’t been ever or lately, Parker has a quaint downtown area with plenty of restaurants within walking distance of the theatre. Murder for Two is a hot ticket, and certainly one of the funniest things to see on stage in the metro area this fall.
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