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by Paul Pörtner, adapted by Marilyn Abrams & Bruce Jordan, directed by Bob Lohrmann

Drayton Entertainment, St. Jacobs Schoolhouse Theatre, St. Jacobs

September 14-December 23, 2018

Tony: “Hello. Shear Madness – where we curl up and dye for you”

Everyone knows that Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is not only the longest running play in Britain but the longest running play in history.  It opened in 1952 and has been going ever since.  Fewer might know that Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano is the longest running play in France.  The current production opened in 1957 in Paris and has been going ever since.  What then is the longest running play in the United States?  The answer is that it’s not an American play at all.  It’s Shear Madness, an adaptation of the 1963 German play Scherenschnitt by Paul Pörtner (1925-84) that has been running at the same theatre in Boston since 1980.  Not only that, there are productions of the play currently running in Athens, Kraków, Mexico City, Paris, and, surprisingly, two productions running concurrently in Seoul. 

So what makes this play so popular?  Drayton Entertainment has given people an easy way to find out since it is staging a production at the Schoolhouse Theatre in St. Jacobs that runs until December 23, 2018.  One of the reasons is that Shear Madness is one of the first and best plays ever written to include audience interaction.  The play will make the greatest impact on those who know nothing at all about it.  So if you are one of these, all you need to know is that the Drayton production is immensely entertaining and definitely worth an evening out.     

David Antscherl’s detailed 1960s-style set, including running water for the sinks, represents the unisex Shear Madness Hair Salon, which in this production is located somewhere in downtown St. Jacobs.  Hairdresser and manicurist Barbara DeMarco (Jacquelyn French) and salon proprietor Tony Whitcomb (Robbie Towns) are busy at work.  Barbara is cleaning up the salon and Tony is giving a trim to a young walk-in Mikey Thomas (Gregory Pember).  Much of the humour of the first minutes of the play is that Tony and Barbara spend much more time gossiping than they do in actual work.  That becomes evident when another walk-in arrives, Nick Rosetti (Kevin Sepaul), who wants a shave.  Though Tony smothers him in lather, he is so busy chatting with Barbara that he never gets around to Nick, who wipes his face off and leaves in disgust. 

What so preoccupies Tony is that their landlady, Isabel Czerny, once a famous concert pianist, is planning to make a comeback and is practising constantly.  The continual piano music drifting from her upstairs apartment down to the salon drives him around the bend.      

Soon the two have more to occupy them.  Wealthy regular Eleanor Schubert (Andrea Risk) comes in for some styling before she heads off to Bermuda and antiques dealer Eddie Lawrence (Gord Gammie) arrives, supposedly to see Isabel, even though he and Barbara appear desperately to want to be alone.  Suddenly, Isabel stops playing.  Tony is happy, but Barbara is worried.  Soon she rushes in from Isabel’s place to announce that Isabel has been murdered.  All four people in the salon – Barbara, Tony, Eddie and Eleanor – are now suspects. 

At this point, the play abruptly changes – how it does I will not reveal for those who have never seen it before.  Yet, I will say that the action becomes more engrossing than you might have thought possible.  

One reason that the show has been successful all over the world is that the adaptors of the play allow local productions to relocate the action to their home city and to update the many jokes and puns with local references and up-to-date satire of current events.  In the current production some jokes referring to life in the Kitchener-Waterloo area are so specific that a Toronto resident will likely not understand them.

A deeper reason the that show has been so successful is that it plays with the audience’s notions of genre expectations and perception.  The first act of the play comes across as an overacted Grade B farce filled with slapstick, bad puns and double entendres.  It’s a lot of fun but we watch as we would very light entertainment.  Once, however, the murder has been announced, the genre suddenly changes to a murder mystery where every detail of the action we have just witnessed and may have dismissed as silly turns out to be important.  This change of genres forces our brains to switch gears and it turns out to be an extremely pleasurable mental exercise to recall what we have just seen from an entirely different point of view.

Pörtner’s play is thus playing a game with the audience and so is the expert direction of Bob Lohrmann, the Associate Artistic Director of of the Kennedy Center production of Shear Madness, which happens to be the second-longest running production of any play in the US.  In Act 1, he encourages over the top performances from the entire cast.  Bit, in Act 2 when the cast shows us what “really” happened, they play their parts in a much more realistic, serious manner.  This alone shows that the acting style of the first act has an effect on how we perceive the action. 

The cast is well-nigh ideal and many have appeared in other productions of Shear Madness before and have the timing and change of acting styles down perfectly.  Robbie Towns plays Tony as an unusually flamboyant gay man.  You might well wonder if this is just a stereotype, until Tony asks someone if they think he’s just a stereotype, at which point the self-consciousness of the playing style becomes clear.  The same is true of Jacquelyn French, who plays Barbara as a ditzy salon worker who instinctively dresses in an exceedingly risqué fashion, another deliberate stereotype.

Andrea Risk is hilarious as the wealthy, self-important Eleanor Schubert, who can manage to be offended and intrigued at the same time.  Gord Gammie plays Eddie Lawrence as mysteriously angry and gruff except for the times when Eddie gets Barbara alone for a smooch.  Kevin Sepaul makes Nick Rosetti the most focussed, down-to-earth of the characters with a real talent for acting as the intermediary between the audience and the characters in the play.  Gregory Pember is amusing as a young man who is all too eager to be of help.

Shear Madness can be enjoyed simply as a lark, a fluffy bit of entertainment that suddenly shifts from a satirical farce into a comic whodunnit.  Others will enjoy the the way the show plays with the relation between expectations and perception.  Pörtner is essentially analyzing how an audience approaches different types of theatre in different ways as well as demonstrating the truism that people can witness the same event and yet differ widely in their accounts of it.  In either case Shear Madness is a highly entertaining, deceptively simple show that is far more enlightening than you might at first imagine.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Jacquelyn French, Andrea Risk and Robbie Towns; Kevin Sepaul, Gregory Pember, Jacquelyn French, Robbie Towns and Gord Gammie. ©2018 Liisa Steinwedel.

For tickets, visit www.draytonentertainment.com.