Murder For Two Is Too Much

This touring two-man musical whodunnit keeps most of its fun to itself.

Murder for Two, at the Long Wharf Theater through Aug. 30, is a campy corpse-filled frolic with some ingenious twists and turns and some deft four-hand piano duels. With just two cast members — the lanky Kyle Branzel fielding over a dozen different characters, the furrowed-browed Ian Lowe juggling an equal number of neuroses, and both engaging in endless wordplay and musical comedy antics while pulling apart a ridiculously convoluted murder mystery — Murder for Two is a logistical marvel. Whoever’s running the lighting cues (designed by Jason Lyons) should get as much credit as the actors. Scene changes, certain characters, even bright ideas get their own special illuminations. The actors dash about madly, dropping new hints and old jokes haphazardly, crashing into either other physically and verbally.

The national tour of Murder for Two is directed by Scott Schwartz, who also helmed the show’s original New York productions at Second Stage and New World Stages. Schwartz is known for fast-paced, new-form musicals such as Batboy: The Musical, tick, tick… boom, and Rooms: A Rock Romance. In Connecticut, he directed the musicals L’il Abner and Me and My Girl for the Goodspeed Opera House. Reviews of Schwartz shows use words like ​“overcaffeinated” and ​“gallop.” He’s a good match for Joe Kinosian and Kellen Blair’s frenetic, high-pitched script.

The two-man cast is irrepressible and unstoppable. Lowe (a Yale alum, class of ​’04) and Branzel not only put on funny voices, hats, and glasses; they dance, do pratfalls, smooch, address the audience, slam a door, sing, and accompany that singing by playing the show’s central set piece, a grand piano. They play the piano solo, as a duo, on their knees, standing, sitting, and at one point with their feet. All the time, Lowe and Branzel are using their superficial, quick-change, scattered, and addled characters to carefully delineate a bizarre and increasingly complex murder mystery involving a mystery-story author, suspects who strongly resemble the characters in his books, and motives as random as revenge, romance, and embarrassment. Oh, and in an unrelated mystery, somebody has stolen some ice cream.

Murder for Two seems to throw in everything but the kitchen sink, which admittedly wouldn’t fit well in the luxurious drawing room set, adorned with large-size models of all the weaponry from the board game Clue (lead pipe, candlestick, et al.).

What’s left out in this flash-frozen condensation of old-school whodunnits, unfortunately, is a straight man, or a pause for reflection, or any other thing that all this comic energy could bounce off. Every single moment of the 90-minute show is a joke, a sight gag, a jaunty tune, or a keyboard flourish. There’s no downtime in which to process all this manic energy. You just watch it unspool like an errant, flapping kite.

Branzel and Lowe have about as much fun as two men are allowed to have onstage. But an awful lot of that fun is diffused and diluted before it finds its way out to the audience. Having to fit the rectangular touring stage platform into the Long Wharf’s deep-thrust mainstage performance area doesn’t help. There’s an orchestra pit-sized gap between the show and the front rows of the auditorium. Watching something so frantic at such a distance is like watching a Saturday morning cartoon — highly amusing, plenty colorful, but distant and contained. The audience is acknowledged — there are mock lectures about ringing cell phones, and an audience member is brought onstage very late in the game for strictly gratuitous reasons — but it isn’t deeply connected to the carryings-on.

It is equally tiring trying to figure out what in the overstuffed mystery-story plot is worth focusing on. The story is a self-conscious, openly satrical blend of Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes tropes involving insanely likely suspects, incredible motives, and bright red herrings. It stops making real sense very early on, and the rapid-fire, multi-voice manner in which it’s delivered makes it very difficult to follow for very long. When it all wraps up there’s more relief than revelation.

Composer Kinosian and lyricist Blair (who co-wrote the musical’s wordy book) have crafted some smart, possibly too self-aware songs, often announcing them as the stereotypical craftwork they are. There’s the ​“friendship song,” the unrequited love tune, the rousing ​“let’s do this” anthem, not to mention all the impressive four-hand instrumental workouts. Branzel (who makes the most of his creepy Tony Perkins look for his male characters, and his lithe swanlike grace for his female ones) and Lowe (who balances his leading-man looks with jittery, anxious antics) are able interpreters of this unraveling yarn. But there’s a disconnect between how well the show’s going and how well it’s being received. Murder for Two is ultimately too much.

Murder for Two, presented by Second Stage Theatre, is at the Long Wharf Theater through Aug. 30. Performances are Aug. 21 at 8 p.m., Aug. 22 at 3 & 8 p.m., Aug. 23 at 2 p.m., Aug. 25 at 7 p.m., Aug. 26 at 2 & 7 p.m., Aug. 27 & 28 at 8 p.m., Aug. 29 at 3 & 8 p.m. and Aug. 30 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $61.50. More information is at http://www.longwharf.org