Two guys. A piano. A couple props.
In other words, everything you need for a murder mystery in which Agatha Christie meets the Marx Brothers.
“Reading the script, you get a handle on the sense of humor and the jokes, but the play really comes alive when it’s on stage,” said Ian Lowe, who stars with Kyle Branzel in Murder for Two, a whodunit playing at Long Wharf from Aug. 19 to Aug. 30 about a murdered novelist, the investigators assigned to the case, and the suspects they have to deal with. Lowe plays Marcus, one of the policemen. Branzel plays, well, everyone else.
How many characters is that? “I think it’s 11 or 12,” Lowe said. “It depends on how you count it.”
So Lowe plays the straight man to Branzel, who, apart from a couple simple props, relies solely on a series of physical and vocal transformations to play the other characters, who range from femmes fatale to grad students to Mafia-style heavies. And he’s never one person for very long.
“There are a couple of sequences in the play where Kyle and I are going through the characters at such a quick pace — we developed this system we referred to as ‘swiping’ — that there are, like, six characters who fly by in the course of six lines,” Lowe said.
Even on the page, the play owes a delightful debt to vaudeville, from its heyday about a century ago to the late careers of that theater’s more venerable alumni, like Milton Berle. That carries some risk, too. It would be easy for Murder for Two to tip into a parade of clichés and tics, as a dozen characters rocket by so fast that the audience never finds its footing. So Joe Kinosian (book and music), Kellen Blair (book and lyrics), and Scott Schwartz (direction), in the course of the play’s development, found a way to anchor the shenanigans with a little dose of tragedy.
Schwartz “was interested in finding the truth in all of these characters and all those wacky situations,” Lowe said, “which includes playing some of those moments with seriousness. Marcus, for example, does have this real sense of betrayal, a real sense of pain, from his old partner,” Vanessa — the story behind which this reporter will not spoil.
“We have to add a little salt and pepper into the light, frothy mixture that is this comedy,” Lowe paraphrased Schwartz as saying.
Lowe.
The actors also have to be well-trained pianists. “There’s a grand piano at the center of the stage, and both Kyle and I switch off playing it throughout the show,” Lowe said. “The music is great and also technically difficult. It borrows from musical theater, but also ballet and boogie-woogie. So the music is really diverse, and really fun to play. Joe did a great job of creating a couple of four-hand moments, where Kyle and I are both at the piano.”
Murder for Two got its start with a successful Off-Broadway run and has been on a national tour since last fall. “I’m approaching 200 performances at this point,” Lowe said, and over the course of the run, he and Branzel have honed the show to be as fleet on its feet as possible.
“As with any long-running show, Kyle and I are always focused on keeping the spontaneity,” Lowe said. “We’re continually reinvesting in that. We also travel on this tour with understudies, so I’ve done this show with them, and it’s a whole other set of interpretations.”
But in keeping with the best vaudeville tradition, it’s still all in the timing. “Timing and mental and physical stamina. You let that ball drop for one minute and it could derail a couple jokes,” Lowe said.
With a seasoned cast like that in the driver’s seat, it doesn’t seem likely.
Murder for Two plays at the Long Wharf Theater from Aug. 19 to Aug. 30. Click here for tickets and more information.
