Photo by Brittany App
Almost every seat was taken in Cal Poly’s Spanos Theatre on March 7 to see Clue: The Musical, a two-act raucous reenactment of the board game that surely everyone has played at one time or another in their youth.
Perhaps that accounts for the audience’s equally raucous response to this production, but it’s more likely that they appreciated the all-in, animated, jocular performances that each and every actor brought to the board game’s stereotypical characters—you remember their names, right? Mrs. Peacock (Casey Reichenthal), Professor Plum (John DeVries), Miss Scarlett (Joelle Andrews), Mr. Green (Josh Schneider), Colonel Mustard (Colin Elman), and Mrs. White (Sophia Moreno).
‘Clue: The Musical’ is the kind of show that takes elaborate planning to realize an audience-pleasing, exuberant production such as this.”
Although the audience gets to play along (forms are handed out as you enter the theatre asking you to deduce “whodunit” from clues provided during the show), we get two new characters as well to help guide us on the hunt for the perpetrator—including the murdered man himself.
Mr. Boddy (get it?) is played by the loose-limbed and multi-talented Isaac Lewis (playing the cello now and then, joining music director and keyboard accompanist Paul Marszalkowski who is on stage working as hard as the other performers during the entire show). We also get a wanna-be hard-boiled “Colombo” detective (Marya Wanous) who seems to elicit more comedy than clues when she arrives in the second act after the murderous deed has taken place.
All in all, Clue might as well be an old-fashioned game show, with a set resembling Family Feud (some “lucky” audience members are seated on stage left and right) with various characters “auditioning” for the role of murderer by singing their backstories—all complete with plenty of motives to do Mr. Boddy in.
If you don’t guess who killed Mr. Boddy in which room with what weapon, well, you still will have won the prize of an enjoyable evening of musical theatre.”
This is a sharp production, with a terrific Jason Bolen-designed set, spot-on costuming by Thomas John Bernard, lighting (by Brian Healy) and sound (by Hannah Jackson) that has to be well-timed and perfect (and is), murder weapons and other essential accoutrements organized by properties lead Katherine Konjoyan, and often cute, often comical choreography by Zach Johnson, who always seems to match just the right moves to each performer’s abilities.
All these designs wouldn’t work, however, without the dozens of crew members—unfortunately too numerous to call out here—listed in the program who make the show work in real time (stage managers, follow spot operators, sound mixers) and who work beforehand building costumes, constructing set pieces that are wheeled off and on stage as needed, painting the scenery, and more.
Clue: The Musical is the kind of show that takes elaborate planning to realize an audience-pleasing, exuberant production such as this. Director Karin Hendricks-Bolen has pulled it all together, creating an entertainment that future university productions will be hard-pressed to match.
And if you don’t guess who killed Mr. Boddy in which room with what weapon, well, you still will have won the prize of an enjoyable evening of musical theatre.