Need A Clue? Get One At The Opera House
By John Swartz
Mariposa Arts Theatre’s production of Clue opened Thursday. They are using Gord’s Room in the Opera House, which does two things for them. It allows for audiences of more than 100 per night, and it allows people to make last minute decisions to see the play because there will be room for you.
The play was adapted from the movie, which was adapted from the board game. We have 6 characters, the butcher, the baker, the… whoops, wrong play. This crew all have colourful names, Mustard (Kevin Scharf), Green (Stephen Dobby), Scarlet (Alyssa LaPlume), Peacock (Shannon Howes), White (Stephanie Lamb) and Plum (John (KJ) Kucharik). They were invited to the mansion of a fellow named Boddy, who has been blackmailing each of them, so when he calls, they come, even though they don’t know why they are all there all together.
This thing needs a ringleader, a central character to help the audience keep track and that is the butler, Wadsworth (Adam Brooks). How can there be a play, a farce, set in a mansion without a maid. Clue has one, Yvette (Ashley Legedza).
Those eight carry about 95% of the action. There are other actors, Trevor Mills, Brad Kean, Caitlin Robson, Christine Ryner and Darren Summersby who do various other incidental roles and mostly end up dead, or mostly dead when they return as another character.
The setup is Wadsworth hopes to have each confess to the others what it is they are being blackmailed for, and then one of them kills Boddy while the others serve as accomplices, therefore everyone shuts up and they are all freed from the blackmail.
Wadsworth isn’t who he seems to be, and one of the guests isn’t either. Our sextet of colourful characters survive to the end; it’s the other incidental characters who get knocked off, as does Boddy, maybe.
There are a number of borrowed tropes from other plays and movies, and I likely missed a few of them; though I think I may have been the only one who caught the first, borrowed from Young Frankenstein, when the cook makes her entrance to the stage since hardly anyone one else laughed. They did miss an opportunity to include another, from Pulp Fiction when a briefcase containing the blackmail material was opened. I half expected that was going to happen and slightly disappointed when it didn’t.
The laugh opportunities are distributed between dialogue and physical slapstick devices. There are also some comical dance interludes to distract us from set changes, which are carried out in full view of the audience.
The physical comedy comes to a head at the endings. There are three of them. Before that, Wadsworth takes us all through a rundown of the action so far in a manner worthy of being a Monty Python bit.
He also leads the exposition of what really happened, setting it up by telling them they had to go back to the moment after the singing telegram girl gets shot. It was like watching a TV screen as the VCR rewinds resetting the characters to that moment. And they did it two more times as the other two explanations were told, just in case the audience didn’t get enough of it the first time.
Stephen Bainborough directed. He let it be known before the curtain his approach was to let the actors improvise, in rehearsal, their action. Stephen is a member of the Old Dance Hall Players imrov group; so he used that experience to stickhandle this production, even though he has also been in his fair share of MAT productions and knows how it is working for other directors who may not have let actors have such free rein. In the end, with all the movement on stage, it seems his biggest contribution was as traffic cop, just to keep the actors from running each other over.
There are performances Saturday evening, Sunday afternoon, and Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday next week. You can get tickets online.
(Photos by Deb Halbot) Main: Alyssa LaPlume, John (KJ) Kucharik,, Stephen Dobby, Stephanie Lamb, Shannon Howes and Kevin Scharf in Mariposa Arts Theatre’s Clue.
