It Takes Two. No, Really.

"Murder For Two" at the McGinn/Cazale Theater

            Genius often goes relatively unappreciated.  This is most often the case with brilliant comedy, which can be comparable to great art but is often relegated to obscurity.  And so it is that Joe Kinosian and Kellan Blair’s revolutionary “Murder For Two” is currently running at the McGinn/Cazale Theatre (through August 17^th), a 108-seat venue on 76^th and Broadway, when by rights it should be running every two hours at a real Broadway theater with approximately two or three thousand seats.  Fate can be a complex mistress.

            This superb musical stars an admirably energetic Brett Ryback as an up-and-coming police officer, Marcus Moscowicz, in a small New England town who aspires to be a detective and plans to earn this laurel by solving the case of the murder of Arthur Whitney, a prominent novelist and local resident.  All of the suspects were present at Whitney’s surprise birthday party and had a motive to kill him — Whitney wrote an expository novel about each of them.  The problem is that the suspects are being frustratingly uncooperative.  By the way, all of the suspects (and I do mean all of them) are played by the magnificent Jeff Blumenkrantz.

            This is a difficult premise to pull off.  In order for Mr. Blumenkrantz to portray these seemingly countless possible murderers — some of whom are female — he must resort to accents, props, and complex gestures unique to each different character.  Beyond that, during every musical number, while one actor is singing, the other plays the piano.  No wonder that, by the end of the show, both actors are visibly drenched in sweat.

            But they do it — oh, do they do it.  Both Mr. Ryback and Mr. Blumenkrantz are hugely talented pianists (both have acted as composers on other projects) and even better comic actors.  Mr. Blumenkrantz manages suspect after suspect and quirk after quirk with the aplomb of one man standing in for the full “Saturday Night Live” cast, and Mr. Ryback shines as an idealistic overachiever commensurate to Kevin Price in “The Book of Mormon.”  Not only are the actors perfect, but so is the gorgeous, hysterical score (the lyrics are Blair’s and the music Kinosian’s).  Mr. Ryback’s character is gifted with an utterly catchy ode to crime scene protocol and the role of the pianist in Mr. Blumenkrantz’s countless madcap numbers.  Mr. Blumenkrantz himself, meanwhile, is inexhaustible with song after song, each funnier than the last.  Highlights: “So What,” a semi-confessional number by the psychotic ballerina Barrette Lewis; and the breathtakingly hilarious “It Was Her,” in which he plays both halves of a bickering couple as one half accuses the other of having committed the crime, trying to send her off to jail and away from him.  Have I mentioned that Mr. Blumenkrantz himself actually plays the piano during this number?

            “Murder For Two” is so incredibly good that only its ingenious creators could not fail for words in attempting to describe its vaudevillian perfection.  Not only is it musically and lyrically spectacular, the comedy is Marxian (as in the brothers) in its appeal.  (Actually, at one point an intense interrogation devolves into the two men playing the piano together, like Harpo and Chico at the mall in “The Big Store.”)  It has no flaws.  Even its kitschiness is so well-executed that it plays as something akin to high art.  In the world of comedy, this is the genius that we look for so often and so rarely find.