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music by Jay Turvey & Paul Sportelli, book and lyrics by Morwyn Brebner, directed by Eda Holmes

Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto

January 21-February 23, 2003

"A Stab at Musical-Noir"

"Little Mercy's First Murder", a joint effort of the Shaw Festival and the Tarragon, receives an excellent, inventive production in the Tarragon's smaller Extra Space.  It's too bad that the chamber musical itself is not up to the standards of the production.  The musical starts out with an exciting premise, a sort of self-conscious, singing film noir "Alice in Wonderland", but it goes down too many blind alleys before its 95 minutes are over.

The flaws in the show lie entirely with book and lyrics by Morwyn Brebner.  In 1942 Little Mercy, a poor woman to works in a library in New York, has stabbed her mother.  A policeman is on the scene and so is Weegee, a famous crime photographer.  (A fact not noted in the programme is that Weegee (1899- 1968), né Arthur Fellig, was an actual person.)  With his help Mercy escapes from the murder scene and is given a glimpse of the town she has never seen as Weegee snaps pictures on his nightly tour of crime scenes and society gatherings.  All the while the policeman is in pursuit.

A parade of the highs and lows of city life with a Communist commentator as guide seems a good premise, but Brebner seems to lose sight of her goal as we move through the episodic plot.  Visiting the scene of a fire makes sense, but Weegee's going to the opera just to recreate one of famous photographs does not.  Once they arrive at Sammy's bar at the end, Brebner gets so caught up in the lives of a Norma, transvestite chanteuse, and the barman who is hopelessly in love with her we lose what little point there was to the main plot.  The long scene in the bar seems like a diversion to fill out a shortish show that has run out of ideas.

The music by Paul Sportelli and Jay Turvey, taking its cue from jazz and Kurt Weill, is attractive and appropriate.  But the songs' effectiveness is constantly undermined by Brebner's awkward, unmemorable lyrics.  The policeman's "A Dog Likes a Bone" about beating women comes out of nowhere and "Rhumba!" that might have been used to understand Norma's character of create atmosphere is merely a catalogue of sci-fi monsters more appropriate to the 1950s than 1940s.  It may be no accident that the two best numbers are the Overture sung to nonsense syllables and the misogynist "If Only All Women (Were Whore)" sung in French.

The cast is excellent.  Melody Johnson plays the 31-year-old Little Mercy as a woman who has had so little contact with the outside world she has remained a little girl curious to see if what she has read in books matches reality.  Peter Millard manages to find warmth even within the hardened, cynical Weegee.  Neil Barclay gets the policeman's mix of comedy and menace just right.  Jeff Lillico plays the transvestite with panache making her potentially the most interesting character in the show.  Tony Nappo funny/sad performance makes the enamoured barman's plight believable.  The chameleonic Jane Johanson disappears into a number of roles most notably the mother in the burning house and the society dame at the opera.

Director Eda Holmes keeps the show's pacing taut and gets as close as she can with a deficient script to capturing the mood of an existential "comédie grançant".  John Thompson's set ingeniously provides multiple acting areas within a small space.  Its surround of drying photographs is a constant reminder of Weegee's profession.  Thompson's period costumes are appropriately drab, the better set off the society dame's conspicuous wealth and Norma's would-be elegance.  The props supervised by Tracy Taylor especially for the fireman's hose spouting blue streamers as water is always inventive.  Andrea Lundy's makes the most of the theme of photography, often using Weegee's flash to open a scene after a blackout.  Hers is one of the most creative uses of lighting I've seen in the Tarragon Extra Space.   

While the performances and physical production make the show enjoyable, Brebner's book and lyrics need a major overhaul before this "musical-noir" as she terms it can be called successful.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2003-05-08.

Photo: Tony Nappo, Melody Johnson, Neil Barclay, Jeff Lillico, Jane Johanson and Peter Millard.  ©2004 Tarragon Theatre.