By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
“Clue” is a slapstick murder mystery that fires off laugh lies like a comic Tommy gun with the dead bodies piling up in the process.
The farce based on the movie that was based on the Parker Brothers board game opened Tuesday night at the Stranahan, 4645 Heatherdowns Blvd. Toledo. as part of the Broadway in Toledo series.
The show runs through Sunday. Showtimes are: Wednesday, May 7, 7:30 p.m.; Thursday, May 8, 7:30 p.m.; Friday, May 9, 7:30 p.m.; Saturday, May 10, 2025 2:00 and 7:30 p.m.; and Sunday, May 11, at 1 and 6:30 p.m. Tickets are available at BroadwayInToledo.com and StranahanTheater.com.
There’s not so much a plot as a series of pratfalls. The jokes are all turned inside out with constant references to a character in a room with some possible implement of mayhem. Tommy gun not included.
The frenetic action and rapid fire delivery of the lines takes the place of any nuance as if the plot was concocted by a bunch of hyperactive 10-year-olds.
As such its slapstick humor, at times slightly bawdy, is intended to tap into the inner 10-year-old of theatergoers.
The butler Wadsworth (Jeff Skowron) greets us. He’s the butler of Boddy mansion. He will over the course of 80 minutes or so (with no intermission) be our guide.
First he introduces us to the other staff the French maid Yvette (Elisabeth Yancey) and the cook, BGSU’s own Mariah Burks, who comes out of the kitchen brandishing a meat cleaver. Foreshadowing? Well, maybe, if it was another kind of play. Here it’s just another cue for the thunder and lighting effect.
[RELATED: BGSU grad Mariah Burks yuks it up in Broadway tour of ‘Clue’]
Then one by one the beloved “Clue” characters show up at the door. All have aliases and have been instructed not to discuss the details of their real lives. There’s the pompous and ineffectual Colonel Mustard (David Hess). Mrs. White (Donna English) whose husband spends all his time on his back. He’s dead under mysterious circumstances, just like Mrs. White’s other husbands.
There’s the fusty Mrs. Peacock (Jennifer Allen) who can’t bear not telling the others she is the wife of a powerful senator. The clumsy Mr. Green played by the limber-limbed John Shartzer.
The creepy Professor Plum (Evan Zes), and the seductive and caustic Miss Scarlet (Christina Anthony) arrive together, last. He supposedly picked her up after her car broke down on the road to the remote mansion.
They all have back stories and secrets, but these won’t be divulged until we meet the mansion’s owner, Mr. Boddy.
When Alex Ayiek as Mr. Boddy arrives we learn that he has been blackmailing all of them and presents them with various murder weapons that will somehow bring the scheme to a bloody head.
To anyone who has played the board game, it’s no spoiler to say Boddy is the show’s first body, which frees Ayiek to play other characters. Burks and Jamil A.C. Mangan also make appearances under various guises.
All this is set in 1954 during the Red Scare with a few scant mentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Given one of the characters is gay that adds a bit of tension, but rest assured this is not a political allegory. There’s nothing serious that can’t be disposed of by a flop.
The play is a rollick. The best bit has Wadsworth rehashing the entire plot of the show to that point at rapid speed. Does this help to reveal the murderer, or murderers? No. Nor will I. You’ll just have to go find out for yourself.
