Clues were everywhere in Next Act's "Red Herring" but they just didn't add up
Mary MacDonald Kerr, Zach Thomas Woods and Bo Johnson (covered). Photo by A.J.Magoon.
Of all the gin joints and theaters in all the world, I had to walk into Next Act. The name’s Friday. The date was Saturday. And the sign on the door said Red Herring by Michael Hollinger. The marketing material stated that the show was running through January 2. But running from what? That's what I was hired to find out.
At rise, there were a couple of gum shoes getting comfortable out of their trench coats, making honeymoon plans when they got the bad news: a mysterious man who may have been part of Russian intelligence wasn’t going to be waking up that morning – the victim of foul play. Working my way through Boston accents as thick as chowder, I quickly realized that the lucky stiff at the morgue was our John Doe. The local police, led by a brassy dame Maggie Pelletier (Mary MacDonald Kerr), were sniffing around this dead fish and so were the feds, namely the straight arrow, by-the-book Frank Keller (Dylan Bolin). And so was Joe McCarthy if you could believe the news reels. Not to mention his recently deflowered daughter Lynn (Eva Nimmer). And her ultra-nerdy physicist boyfriend (a pitch-perfect Zach Thomas Woods) whose interest in helping the Commies gave me the heebie-jeebies.
The usual suspects. They were all there, in this satire of 1950s detective dramas crossed with the Red Scare, directed by Next Act Artistic Director David Cecsarini. And if you’re getting a funny sense of deja vu, don’t worry, you’re not seeing double. This is a remount from 2005, when the company took its first crack at the case. I only wish they’d had more time. Perhaps then, they could have resolved some tone and technical issues. . . .
I wore blue. The bad guys wore gray. And then the whole world turned to technicolor stock photos. Cecsarini uses film clips and still photography extensively, projected on screens at the back of the set to give us an idea of where we are in each of the play’s 24 scenes. But in one moment the 1950s world is black and white, in the next it looks like a rainbow colored vacation photo from Shutterstock. In a period drama where audiences have such clear style expectations, the inconsistency looked sloppy. Which made me suspicious. . .
Double-crossed. In a cryptic note I received days before the performance I was told to expect a “fast-moving, film noir spoof.” But from the minute I sat down I knew I’d been double-crossed and hung out to dry. The short, snappy scenes I’d been promised, filled with goofy, classic characters writ large were interrupted by two things: scene changes as long as Joe McCarthy’s rantings before congress, and a bad case of realism.
On the first count, nothing kills comedy faster than a slow pace. On opening night the blackouts between scenes to set props and arrange furniture were so long that the audience got tired of applauding during each one and decided instead to bear them in strained silence.
On the second charge, unlike straight plays, parodies suffer under the weight of emotional truth. And when three-dimensional people try to inhabit purposefully two-dimensional roles, the comedy is obliterated like the aftermath of an atom bomb.
(By the way, this production spends quite a bit of time replaying that blast – along with a “duck and cover” cartoon that looks both grotesque in its naivete and chillingly similar to today’s active shooter drills to modern audiences – both of which take us way out of the play. Judging from the line in the script following the explosion, the playwright meant it as a punchline, not a repeated gut punch.)
Eva Nimmer and Zach Thomas Woods. Photo by A.J. Magoon.
The saddest example of bringing too much heart to a cartoon character is Eva Nimmer’s Lynn, who talks at length about getting pregnant after sleeping with her fiance’s lab partner and nemesis. I believe this was supposed to be a comment on perky ingenues of the genre having only one important character trait – their innocent virginity. Adding complexity to this character does not make her conversations with her beau or her predicament funny. It also doesn’t make them a satire on anything.
Bo Johnson and Kelly Doherty. Photo by A.J. Magoon.
But then there was a dame. At the heart of the story it’s always the same; there’s a dame involved. And in this case, there was one dame in particular whose memory I just couldn’t shake, though she was a master of disguise. One minute there she was making cookies in a pretty pink pinafore as Joe McCarthy’s wife in the wilds of Wisconsin. The next she was a stone-faced landlady in a fuzzy robe on the docks of Boston Harbor. I even thought I caught a glimpse of her in a chic black number, when I peeked in the window of a dress shop, helping other dames into their disguises as virginal, thoroughly unmarried brides. But she couldn’t hide forever. Thanks to a program that an usher smuggled to me, I realized it was Milwaukee treasure Kelly Doherty, back onstage and up to her old tricks. Yes sir, I could see immediately that her acting chops went all the way down to the floor – and then some. With a resume as long as hers, I’d expect nothing less. With her often deadpan delivery and fantastic catalogue of accents, she was a dead ringer for the star of the show.
And a private dick. According to his bio, Dylan Bolin has only stepped onto the Next Act boards three times in the last three decades, and that’s clearly not enough. Based on this turn as Frank Keller, the hard-drinking, hard boiled, harder-they-fall G-man, it’s time for him to stop the undercover act and come out of hiding. Because even if the opinion of one little reviewer doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, I hope I’ll see him onstage again soon.