BWW Reviews: AND THEN THERE WERE NONE Will Kill You at The Fulton

There is a great truth about Agatha Christie that most casual readers fail to recognize. The purveyor of wicked deaths was also wickedly funny. Deaths might be incredibly gory - Christie, a nurse, was a poisons expert - but her dialogue was often nothing short of hysterical. Hercule Poirot was the source of many a bon mot, and Jane Marple's observations of her fellow villagers were caustic but delectable. Various Marple sidekicks were riotous, while Tommy and Tuppence were flippantly silly. On stage, SPIDER'S WEB is nothing but comic, and comedy is an enormous side dish in many of Christie's other plays. Unfortunately, possibly because the namesake novel is one of Christie's least droll mysteries, AND THEN THERE WERE NONE is almost always presented on stage as unrelentingly horrific - tragic, when its gruesome multiple deaths were offset by some of Christie's best quips. It's a terrifically popular play - it only bombed (quite literally) on the West End the night the St James Theatre was hit during the Blitz - but even at the time, many producers consulted thought it was awfully tricky to stage. Missing the humor will do that.

There are times that the hard to stage is made to look incredibly easy. That's the case with the Fulton Theatre's current production of AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, directed by Marc Robin and with set design by William Mohney. Pardon me. It's set-designed by William Mohney, and with direction by Marc Robin.

This writer has consistently decreed that the best sets in Central Pennsylvania are designed by Jim Fouchard at Totem Pole Playhouse, with a close second to Rainbow Dinner Theatre and Cindy DiSavino. For once, Fouchard and DiSavino have both been completely outstaged. Mohney's set for the mansion on Soldier Island is the set of the season. Since the house is itself a character in the play, it needs to be constructed well. The word here is more likely "astonishing". Two stories of curving, and solid, staircase, leaded cathedral windows, textured wall paint, beams, pillars, and the like look miraculously real even from the front of the theatre. Anyone in the area who works with set design should be required to examine the set, at least from the audience perspective, to see what can be done with realistic rather than minimalist set. While minimalism is almost always better than poorly done realism, perfect realism, when executed, is awe-inspiring.

And, by the way, there's a show to go with the set, though you may forget that at the moment the curtain goes up.

Marc Robin has, it is pleasing to say, managed to restore the comedy to AND THEN THERE WERE NONE. Not only has he freed a uniformly fine cast from the usual direness of reciting what should be funny one-liners with funereal diction (apparently most directors are afraid of recognizing that these are in fact jokes intended to lighten the grim atmosphere of the play, as they usually refuse to allow the humor to come through), but he's tapped a wonderful vein of 1930's melodrama to comic effect. As one delicious example, every time someone observes that the killer must be one of the people in the room, each person is suddenly spotlighted. Once would have been amusing. Multiple times is pure silliness, but it's a levity that's well worth the indulgence. Hearing an audience laugh through AND THEN THERE WERE NONE as well as shrieking through it is indeed a joyful noise.

Shrieking? Well, there is a serial killer lurking on the premises, and people are being poisoned, shot, stabbed, shoved off cliffs, and otherwise dispatched with glorious, perhaps almost excessive, abandon. Of course it's on an island. Of course there's no boat. Of course the boat from the mainland won't be back until after the weekend, at which point everyone there, even the household help, should be dead. No wonder Christie felt audiences need laughs during the show. The book, which can be put down and which has no illustrations, isn't such a concentrated mass of in-your-face fright. The deaths, as fans of the show, the book - Christie's best-selling novel and the world's best-selling mystery - or one of the two movies (this author is a fan of the rather poor but hey-it's-Hugh O'Brien! second one) recall, are grouped around the children's rhyme of Ten Little Indians, reconfigured in the script's 2005 revisions as Ten Little Soldier Boys, with each guest in the house meeting their death in a fashion based on their place in the rhyme. It allows for some serious gore - and in this case, for some delightful milking of death moments. The first poisoning is gross enough for a Nickelodeon slime fan to love, the "bear mauling" is classic, and the death of Miss Emily Brent, by a "sting," is a long comic sequence of total glory, worth every laugh and clap it gets.

As for the cast, Peter Matthew Smith's Captain Philip Lombard is a poor man's Richard Hannay, with military background but not much couth; under the gloss of an officer's polish he's still déclassé, though fortunately a "good man in a tight spot." It's nice to see Lombard not being played as the usual suave hero, which doesn't really fit the character but which actors and directors go to with great frequency. Katie Sina's Vera Claythorne, the temporary secretary, is pretty and smart, and a good bit tougher than she looks. Will Ray's a delightful Anthony Marston, a young man with a "the highway is my way, so get off my road" outlook on life and on motoring.

Frequent Fulton guest David Girolmo, who's also done Christie's WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION there, is a spot-on William Blore, a thorough but perhaps unimaginative policeman-turned-detective. This may be the most effective portrayal of Blore this writer has seen. Charis Leos and Brian Martin, as the hired help, give the lie to "the butler did it" quite perfectly. Paul L. Nolan is wonderfully weird as Sir Lawrence Wargrave, a retired judge, while Michael Iannucci's Doctor Armstrong is a nerve doctor with no nerve of his own. Dale Benson is retired soldier and professional clubman General MacKenzie, while Liz Shivener gives a magnificent performance as the overly religious and thoroughly dislikable Emily Brent, whose death is not only a great comic turn but perhaps the one the audience most wants to cheer.

In most productions, the killer isn't seen on stage. Here the killer is on stage, completely disguised, in the dark - in some instances the killer merely creeps onstage in the darkness, but at other times the unknown murderer kills on stage, and all of the ten little soldiers that are on display because of the poem are removed by the killer, who has a secret escape in the main room's fireplace. It's a thoroughly delightful conceit, and Robin has timed the killer's appearances properly, to those of us well versed in whodunnit in this play, to avoid giving away their identity.

There's even melodramatic sound work of properly creepy music and organ chords, not to mention rain, thunder, and everything else needed to remind an audience that someone's going to die in a few minutes. The only thing missing from this production is popcorn, which one really has the urge to eat while watching this version of Christie's story unfold. Much as I took issue with Marc Robin's direction of melodramatic horror in THE WOMAN IN BLACK, I must compliment him on his handling of this production, which breathes new life into a play so frequently done and so frequently mishandled or left to be just slightly boring in the midst of Christie's biggest dispatching of victims. This is the way Dame Agatha would want this play to be seen now. See it yourself.

At the Fulton through February 15, which is simply not a long enough run. Get tickets now. If you think you only like musicals, prepare to have your mind changed. Visit thefulton.org for tickets and information.

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