Kirsten Vangsness can't get away from Dean Lemont's grip in Theater of Note's 'Kill Me, Deadly,' directed by Kiff Scholl.
As eternally cool as it is, film noir, with its supercharged style and general seriousness almost begs to be deflated -- and playwright Bill Robens answers the call. In a voice redolent of cigarette smoke and wailing saxophone, "Kill Me, Deadly," has great fun with the genre stereotypes, including a tough gumshoe whose secretary is a much better detective than he is. The world premiere production at Theater of Note succeeds on all levels, from its lush look to Kiff Scholl's inspired direction, and its cast, with assorted thugs and a deeply duplicitous dame, is hilarious and superb.
When private detective Charlie Nickels (Dean Lemont) meets the rich Lady Clairmont (Kathleen Mary Carthy) and her daughter Veronica (Megan Bartle), the main thing he notices is the Bengal Diamond, a huge red gem she keeps on display. This stone is said to be cursed, which quickly becomes apparent as Lady Clairmont is murdered and the diamond stolen. Veronica and her odd brother Clive (Nicholas S. Williams) are immediate suspects, but then so is the fired gardener, Jaime (Phinneas Kiyomura). Or it could be the fast-talking and mysterious Mona (Kirsten Vangsness), whom Charlie might suspect if he wasn't in love with her.
Lemont is perfectly cast as Charlie, personifying the noir hero both in his deadpan vocal delivery and physical presence. Vangsness is brilliant as the manipulative Mona, who almost trips over herself switching from seductiveness to vulnerability to selfishness, sometimes within a sentence. The actress captures this energy in a perf that sounds like a southern Liza Minnelli combined with a touch of Mae West. And Mona's earnest rendition of the deliberately sappy song "Rainbow Dream" is comedically sublime. Carthy is bitchily delectable as the haughty and strident Lady Clairmont, and Bartle is appropriately self-possessed and flirtatious as Veronica. Williams is excellent as the swaybacked Clive, his freaky vibe recalling Dennis Weaver's creepy clerk in "Touch of Evil," and Darrett Sanders is spot-on as the amiable goon Louie.
Scholl directs the show with stylish panache and quick pacing, and he gets sharp, satirical perfs from his cast. Robens knows this genre well and takes it for a manic ride, reveling in lines such as "She had a hold on me like a wolverine on a moose." The only downside is that the show feels long and could use a bit of judicious trimming, but this is a relatively small complaint.
Davis Campbell's set, highlighted by a car that seems to have film rear-projected on the back window, just like it was done in the movies, is efficient and effective. Kimberly Freed's costumes are surprisingly lush and evocative, and Matt Richter's expert lighting provides the seductive shadows that are the glory of noir.
Sets, Davis Campbell; costumes, Kimberly Freed; lighting, Matt Richter; sound, Adam Phalen; production stage manager, Carolyn
Connolly. Opened June 26, 2009, reviewed June 27; runs through Aug. 1. Running time: 2 HOURS, 30 MIN.
LOS ANGELES • JUNE 29, 2009 • VARIETY.COM
| Legit Review |
by Terry Morgan
Kill Me, Deadly
Playwright Bill Robens, who previously focused his satiric lens on classic Charles Dickens (A Mulholland Christmas Carol) and Irwin Allen disaster flicks (The Poseidon Adventure: The Musical and The Towering Inferno: The Musical) now goes after film-noir private- eye melodramas, with rib-tickling results. Though the tomfoolery wears thin in the home stretch, this merry excursion in scenery-chewing fun benefits from Kiff Scholl's zany directorial touches and a game cast milking the genre clichés for maximum hilarity.
The underbelly of 1948 Hollywood, as filtered through the pulpy sensibility of vintage B-movies, is cleverly conjured by Davis Campbell's evocative set, Kimberly Freed's deliciously gaudy costumes, Matt Richter's shadowy lighting, and Darrett Sander's hysterically cheesy black-and-white projections.
Merging seamlessly into this kicky milieu, stereotypical characters from formulaic whodunits quickly set the story in motion. At the center of the action, of course, is gumshoe Charlie Nickles (Dean Lemont), who projects an aura of detached confidence. Yet in analyzing clues, he always seems to be several steps behind his resourceful secretary, Ida (Lynn Odell), a CSI-caliber whiz decades ahead of her time. Haughty millionaire Lady Clairmont (beautifully overplayed by Kathleen Mary Carthy as a daffy cross between Bette Davis and Angela Lansbury)summons Charlie to her home, revealing that someone has threatened to kill her. After the murder inevitably takes place, the suspects include the dowager's fired Guatemalan gardener (Phinneas Kiyomura), her uppity butler (Ezra Buzzington), her wacko son (Nicholas S. Williams), her spoiled daughter (Megan Bartle), and a histrionic femme fatale in a flaming-red gown (Kirsten Vangsness in the production's funniest portrayal—a damsel-in-distress who's as helpless as Attila the Hun).
The plot is negligible, and the killer's identity is evident midway through. Robens would do audiences a favor by cutting at least a half-hour out of the piece. The laughs become scarcer as the story complications linger on and the shtick begins to feel repetitive. Nonetheless, this vehicle shows great promise, and you simply haven't lived until you've heard Vangsness bulldoze her way through an ingeniously ludicrous "rainbow" song that's equal parts Judy Garland in overdrive and Julie Andrews at her spoonful-of-saccharine sunniest.
Presented by and at Theatre of NOTE, 1517 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood. June 26–Aug. 1. Fri.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.(323) 856-8611
The underbelly of 1948 Hollywood, as filtered through the pulpy sensibility of vintage B-movies, is cleverly conjured by Davis Campbell's evocative set, Kimberly Freed's deliciously gaudy costumes, Matt Richter's shadowy lighting, and Darrett Sander's hysterically cheesy black-and-white projections.
Merging seamlessly into this kicky milieu, stereotypical characters from formulaic whodunits quickly set the story in motion. At the center of the action, of course, is gumshoe Charlie Nickles (Dean Lemont), who projects an aura of detached confidence. Yet in analyzing clues, he always seems to be several steps behind his resourceful secretary, Ida (Lynn Odell), a CSI-caliber whiz decades ahead of her time. Haughty millionaire Lady Clairmont (beautifully overplayed by Kathleen Mary Carthy as a daffy cross between Bette Davis and Angela Lansbury)summons Charlie to her home, revealing that someone has threatened to kill her. After the murder inevitably takes place, the suspects include the dowager's fired Guatemalan gardener (Phinneas Kiyomura), her uppity butler (Ezra Buzzington), her wacko son (Nicholas S. Williams), her spoiled daughter (Megan Bartle), and a histrionic femme fatale in a flaming-red gown (Kirsten Vangsness in the production's funniest portrayal—a damsel-in-distress who's as helpless as Attila the Hun).
The plot is negligible, and the killer's identity is evident midway through. Robens would do audiences a favor by cutting at least a half-hour out of the piece. The laughs become scarcer as the story complications linger on and the shtick begins to feel repetitive. Nonetheless, this vehicle shows great promise, and you simply haven't lived until you've heard Vangsness bulldoze her way through an ingeniously ludicrous "rainbow" song that's equal parts Judy Garland in overdrive and Julie Andrews at her spoonful-of-saccharine sunniest.
Presented by and at Theatre of NOTE, 1517 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood. June 26–Aug. 1. Fri.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.(323) 856-8611
Film noir is an easy target for parody. It's cliches are so ingrained in our subconscious we often don't realize that many of them came from other parodies of film noir rather than from the actual original movies themselves. According to many critics (and what do critics know?) noir is not even, really, a genre. Rather, they say, it's a mood or a style. Whether or not it's a genre, as Justice Potter Stewart famously said about hard-core pornography, I know it when I see it. Dark, usually black and white. Odd camera angles. Lots of shadows (especially of Venetian blinds.) Hard-boiled anti-heroes pulled into dark doings by femme fatales. Thugs and thug police. Okay, so a lot of noir don't have any of those things. This one does. Shut up.
Theatre of NOTE's production of Bill Robens' new play Kill Me, Deadly got it mostly right. Upon entering the theatre, the audience is confronted with a black and white set (well, gray and white – well, blue/gray and white) split into three areas. The first is a typical, run down private dick's office, the second a living room and the third, the front seat of a car with a rear-projection screen as a back window so that, when Charlie, the hard-boiled PI (played by Dean Lemont) drives the car, we can see where he's been. In black and white, of course. The details, especially in the office, are spot on. There is even, at one point, a completely unexplained and unacknowledged appearance of that most egregious of all McGuffins, a Maltese Falcon. Delicious.
Even the costumes (by Kimberly Freed) are black and white, with the startling exception of Mona's dress, which is shockingly red. Mona (Kirsten Vangsness) is, after all, the Lady in Red. We'll get back to Mona.
The title of this play is a take-off on that of a quintessential noir, a "B" movie directed by Robert Aldrich called Kiss Me Deadly. (It was Cloris Leachman's first movie. She dies in the first ten minutes, but not before pulling playboy PI Mike Hammer, played by Ralph Meeker, into some very dark dealings indeed.)
The story is fairly typical in its own convoluted way: A rich woman, Lady Clairmont (Kathleen Mary Carthy), has gotten a death threat and hires Charlie to find out who sent it. She has two kids, a sexy daughter, Veronica (the very sexy Megan Bartle), a nerdy, browbeaten son, Clive (the extremely funny Nicholas S. Williams – watch what he can do with a jar of peanut butter) and a large, cursed, red diamond (played, I assume, by a large, cursed piece of red plastic.) Lady Clairmont is dispatched fairly quickly over a bridge. Various thugs and policemen try to thwart Charlie from delving too far. There are many twists, mostly for the sake of twists, and many references, both historical and modern, to the Los Angeles area. Aren't all good noir films rooted in historical LA?
Lady Clairmont's British butler, Wilson (played the night I saw it by the understudy, Trevor H. Olsen), is involved with (having an affair with? Hmm...) a mysterious lady in red. That lady in question is a waitress at the joint Charlie hangs out in, and she sidles her way into Charlie's heart and pulls him more deeply into the mystery. That lady is a marimba player who loves whacking small metal balls with soft little hammers. That lady, played by Kirsten Vangsness, is marvelous, from the delivery of the parody torch song, Rainbow Dreams (written by Bill Newlin and Bill Robens) to the booming, Jessica Rabbit "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way" voice to the sultry seduction to the comic chops. Act two is much funnier, and much tighter than act one, and a great deal of the credit for that goes to Ms. Vangsness, who is featured much more prominently in act two.
Don't get me wrong, the rest of the cast is uniformly good. Lynn Odell as the secretary who is smarter and a better PI than her boss. Darrett Sanders, Phinneas Kiyomura, Keith Allen, Joe Roche and Wendi West play various bumbling body guards, gentle thugs, mobsters, clueless policemen, gardeners, tramps and hoboes and are all quite good. Mr. Lemont, who is a good actor, and very funny, doesn't quite physically fit the hard-boiled, morally questionable private dick. His baby face and masculine stance play more as a leading man than the grizzled anti-hero. A minor complaint.
Kill Me, Deadly is directed by Kiff Scholl and written by Bill Robens. The script is mostly quite witty ("... don't play dumb with me, Mona, it makes your neck look fat.") It is not the groundbreaking theatre that NOTE is famous for, but they all can't be "important", can they? As I mentioned, act one is a little slow, although it definitely picks up the pace and humor in act two. The "who done it" is fairly obvious from the get-go. Part of the parody, I suspect. The set, designed by Davis Campbell, is clever. Besides the car, which is effective, it has a revolving pylon in the middle that serves as the doorway to various houses, offices, establishments, etc.
Theatre of NOTE is located at 1517 N. Cahuenga, Hollywood, CA 90028 (just north of Sunset Blvd.)
Kill Me Deadly opened June 26, 2009 plays Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 pm and Sundays at 2 pm and 7 pm through August 1, 2009.
Ticket prices: $22.00. Seniors and students$18.00. Reservations online at www.theatreofnote.com or by phone at (323) 856-8611.
Theatre of NOTE's production of Bill Robens' new play Kill Me, Deadly got it mostly right. Upon entering the theatre, the audience is confronted with a black and white set (well, gray and white – well, blue/gray and white) split into three areas. The first is a typical, run down private dick's office, the second a living room and the third, the front seat of a car with a rear-projection screen as a back window so that, when Charlie, the hard-boiled PI (played by Dean Lemont) drives the car, we can see where he's been. In black and white, of course. The details, especially in the office, are spot on. There is even, at one point, a completely unexplained and unacknowledged appearance of that most egregious of all McGuffins, a Maltese Falcon. Delicious.
Even the costumes (by Kimberly Freed) are black and white, with the startling exception of Mona's dress, which is shockingly red. Mona (Kirsten Vangsness) is, after all, the Lady in Red. We'll get back to Mona.
The title of this play is a take-off on that of a quintessential noir, a "B" movie directed by Robert Aldrich called Kiss Me Deadly. (It was Cloris Leachman's first movie. She dies in the first ten minutes, but not before pulling playboy PI Mike Hammer, played by Ralph Meeker, into some very dark dealings indeed.)
The story is fairly typical in its own convoluted way: A rich woman, Lady Clairmont (Kathleen Mary Carthy), has gotten a death threat and hires Charlie to find out who sent it. She has two kids, a sexy daughter, Veronica (the very sexy Megan Bartle), a nerdy, browbeaten son, Clive (the extremely funny Nicholas S. Williams – watch what he can do with a jar of peanut butter) and a large, cursed, red diamond (played, I assume, by a large, cursed piece of red plastic.) Lady Clairmont is dispatched fairly quickly over a bridge. Various thugs and policemen try to thwart Charlie from delving too far. There are many twists, mostly for the sake of twists, and many references, both historical and modern, to the Los Angeles area. Aren't all good noir films rooted in historical LA?
Lady Clairmont's British butler, Wilson (played the night I saw it by the understudy, Trevor H. Olsen), is involved with (having an affair with? Hmm...) a mysterious lady in red. That lady in question is a waitress at the joint Charlie hangs out in, and she sidles her way into Charlie's heart and pulls him more deeply into the mystery. That lady is a marimba player who loves whacking small metal balls with soft little hammers. That lady, played by Kirsten Vangsness, is marvelous, from the delivery of the parody torch song, Rainbow Dreams (written by Bill Newlin and Bill Robens) to the booming, Jessica Rabbit "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way" voice to the sultry seduction to the comic chops. Act two is much funnier, and much tighter than act one, and a great deal of the credit for that goes to Ms. Vangsness, who is featured much more prominently in act two.
Don't get me wrong, the rest of the cast is uniformly good. Lynn Odell as the secretary who is smarter and a better PI than her boss. Darrett Sanders, Phinneas Kiyomura, Keith Allen, Joe Roche and Wendi West play various bumbling body guards, gentle thugs, mobsters, clueless policemen, gardeners, tramps and hoboes and are all quite good. Mr. Lemont, who is a good actor, and very funny, doesn't quite physically fit the hard-boiled, morally questionable private dick. His baby face and masculine stance play more as a leading man than the grizzled anti-hero. A minor complaint.
Kill Me, Deadly is directed by Kiff Scholl and written by Bill Robens. The script is mostly quite witty ("... don't play dumb with me, Mona, it makes your neck look fat.") It is not the groundbreaking theatre that NOTE is famous for, but they all can't be "important", can they? As I mentioned, act one is a little slow, although it definitely picks up the pace and humor in act two. The "who done it" is fairly obvious from the get-go. Part of the parody, I suspect. The set, designed by Davis Campbell, is clever. Besides the car, which is effective, it has a revolving pylon in the middle that serves as the doorway to various houses, offices, establishments, etc.
Theatre of NOTE is located at 1517 N. Cahuenga, Hollywood, CA 90028 (just north of Sunset Blvd.)
Kill Me Deadly opened June 26, 2009 plays Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 pm and Sundays at 2 pm and 7 pm through August 1, 2009.
Ticket prices: $22.00. Seniors and students$18.00. Reservations online at www.theatreofnote.com or by phone at (323) 856-8611.
Kill Me, Deadly at Theatre of Note
by Geoff Hoff
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
by Geoff Hoff
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Theater review: 'Kill Me, Deadly' at Theatre of NOTE
July 7, 2009 | 2:00 pm
by Philip Brandes
Like one of its hot lead telegrams from the business end of a Smith and Wesson, "Kill Me, Deadly" at Theatre of NOTE delivers the goods in spades. Set in 1947 Hollywood, where life is as cheap as a chalk-stripe suit, Bill Robens' smart, snappy parody of hard-boiled noir comes complete with jaded gumshoe, a dame in distress -- and plenty of moid-ah.
As Charlie Nickels, the shamus with low morals and high ideals, Dean Lemont has the hangdog mug and rugged bearing befitting a man for whom opportunity usually knocks with a punch in the gut. Charlie may not be the sharpest shiv in the cutlery collection -- his wise-cracking secretary (Lynn Odell) supplies the real crime-solving brainpower -- but he's been around the track and breezes his way through the hyperbolic similes in the tongue-twisting Raymond Chandler-esque narration.
Charlie's latest case involves a 300-karat blood-red diamond (that comes with a curse, natch) and a menaced widow (Kathleen Mary Carthy) who's lousy with dough and hated by all. At the center of the intrigue sits scarlet-clad femme fatale Mona, a nightclub torch singer and vibraphonist vamped to the hilt by hilarious Kirsten Vangsness (on the lam from TV's "Criminal Minds"). "I try to be good, I really do," she pouts in spot-on Judy Garland intonations, "but who has time these days?" Charlie may be a chump for letting down his guard, but like he says, "falling in love with a broad you can trust is like reading a book you already know the ending to."
Kiff Scholl's stylized staging employs period props, directed lighting, and, when needed, cheesy video effects like the hypnodisc spiraling above the drugged Charlie's head during his hallucinatory roundup of suspects: the client's smarmy bookworm son (Nicholas S. Williams), her equestrian daughter (Megan Bartle, a Lauren Bacall blond with gams that stretch to Tijuana), their snooty British butler (Ezra Buzzington), an erudite gardener (Phinneas Kiyomura), and the hired muscle (Darrett Sanders) who feels really, really bad about having to get rough. In a line of work where people typically pass out or die just before giving you the one piece of information you need the most, the question is: Which of these low-lifes are headed for the big sleep? Don't be a sap -- see this one and find out.
July 7, 2009 | 2:00 pm
by Philip Brandes
Like one of its hot lead telegrams from the business end of a Smith and Wesson, "Kill Me, Deadly" at Theatre of NOTE delivers the goods in spades. Set in 1947 Hollywood, where life is as cheap as a chalk-stripe suit, Bill Robens' smart, snappy parody of hard-boiled noir comes complete with jaded gumshoe, a dame in distress -- and plenty of moid-ah.
As Charlie Nickels, the shamus with low morals and high ideals, Dean Lemont has the hangdog mug and rugged bearing befitting a man for whom opportunity usually knocks with a punch in the gut. Charlie may not be the sharpest shiv in the cutlery collection -- his wise-cracking secretary (Lynn Odell) supplies the real crime-solving brainpower -- but he's been around the track and breezes his way through the hyperbolic similes in the tongue-twisting Raymond Chandler-esque narration.
Charlie's latest case involves a 300-karat blood-red diamond (that comes with a curse, natch) and a menaced widow (Kathleen Mary Carthy) who's lousy with dough and hated by all. At the center of the intrigue sits scarlet-clad femme fatale Mona, a nightclub torch singer and vibraphonist vamped to the hilt by hilarious Kirsten Vangsness (on the lam from TV's "Criminal Minds"). "I try to be good, I really do," she pouts in spot-on Judy Garland intonations, "but who has time these days?" Charlie may be a chump for letting down his guard, but like he says, "falling in love with a broad you can trust is like reading a book you already know the ending to."
Kiff Scholl's stylized staging employs period props, directed lighting, and, when needed, cheesy video effects like the hypnodisc spiraling above the drugged Charlie's head during his hallucinatory roundup of suspects: the client's smarmy bookworm son (Nicholas S. Williams), her equestrian daughter (Megan Bartle, a Lauren Bacall blond with gams that stretch to Tijuana), their snooty British butler (Ezra Buzzington), an erudite gardener (Phinneas Kiyomura), and the hired muscle (Darrett Sanders) who feels really, really bad about having to get rough. In a line of work where people typically pass out or die just before giving you the one piece of information you need the most, the question is: Which of these low-lifes are headed for the big sleep? Don't be a sap -- see this one and find out.
