I’m not shouting: ‘Clue’ thru Broadway in Chicago

The Company. Photo by Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade.

Why turn the cult classic film “Clue” into a stage play? Well, do some digging on YouTube and you’ll find that hometown thesps aplenty have been digging into Jonathan Lynn’s screwball repartee (and skirting Paramount’s sensers) with gusto and glee for years. And why not? That screenplay seems like a stage farce that just happened to get made as a film.

Now there’s an officially sanctioned stage adaptation that seems to be doing quite well for itself in amateur and regional licensing. A national tour, currently playing Chicago for a short engagement, seems like a victory lap of sorts, welcoming the cult-faithful to the real live Boddy Manor at long last.

I’ve covered a local production of “Clue” a few years ago and I remember that one fondly enough, but now I can’t help but wonder if this current production–or even the play itself–might be missing a few game pieces. Say, the joke that once held everything together.

Augmenting Lynn’s script with reshaping and shorings-up by Sandy Rustin, Hunter Foster, and Eric Price, the play retains the film’s McCarthy-era Agatha Christie-ish premise: Six pseudonymous D.C. types are being kept under the thumb of a blackmailer named Mister Boddy who, if he wasn’t making a dishonest buck off their dirty secrets, could easily ruin them by throwing them to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Boddy invites them all to his mansion to clear the air–that is, let them all off the hook for an even higher price: murdering his ever-faithful butler Wadsworth, the only other person who knows everything. Of course, the scheme backfires, and Boddy ends up dead. One corpse of many, in fact, as the night goes on and the game becomes as afoot as a very enthusiastic tap dance.

The thing is, these rewrites as well as the direction by Casey Hushion, who has steered this material through many prior regional iterations, play it all for farce from the first thunder clap. The ur-joke of the film, meanwhile, was to play everything deathly seriously; as the bodies pile up and the web of the guests’ interconnected histories and secrets tie the most convoluted of Gordian knots, the film has no choice but to devolve into all-out farce. Such is the dirty secret of any murder mystery, really—it doesn’t take much to render such serious goings-on unserious.

Though as many a comic sage has said, comedy ought to be played seriously. That lack of devolution, then, gives the ensemble that much less to play against. And that’s not really a call for droller direction; all-out one-liner-centric silliness is baked into this script.

And so, overall, this noose doesn’t really tighten. This gunpowder is too damp. Pick your own metaphor–there’s six weapons to choose from.

That said, there are pleasures in watching an ensemble of character actors clumped together and clowning around. Best in show probably belongs to Jeff Skowdron’s Wadsworth who, in a break from Tim Curry’s indefatigable one-step-ahead turn, manages to be just as amusingly confused as everyone else. John Shartzer scores, too, as an especially green Mister Green, tasked with the rubberiest physical comedy. And the mansion as designed by Lee Savage, if a little creaky from being well-traveled, is fittingly both lavish and tongue-in-cheek.

So it’s certainly all well and good that this bunch gets to throw themselves into playing the iconic game. Whether you’ll have fun watching them playing? That’s even odds. One-plus-one-plus-two-plus-one to one, say. Or is it one-plus-two-plus-one-plus-one…

Clue runs through Mar. 2 at 18 W. Monroe St. For tickets or more information, please visit broadwayinchicago.com.

For more reviews on this or other shows, please visit theatreinchicago.com.