Review: Murder for Two at Sacramento Theatre Company

Murder for Two, now playing at Sacramento Theatre Company, is a whodunit where, frankly, you don’t really care who did it or who it was done to.

That’s because the real spotlight in this madcap musical mystery is on the two high-energy leads who portray more than a dozen characters while also singing, dancing and playing the piano.

For STC, this two-man show is handled with aplomb by the talented team of Paul Helm as police-officer/wannabe-detective Marcus Moscowicz and David Taylor Gomes as a dozen suspects and household guests.

The play’s pace is nonstop, the energy level is over-the-top, and the comic mugging is endless—eclipsing the plot line altogether—which is simply a murder at a birthday party where everyone has a motive. With their comedic pacing, synchronized prancing and playful ivory-tickling, the Helm-Gomes duo is the epitome of a vaudeville comedy team inside a film noir setting.

Murder for Two was created by the musical duo of Joe Kinosian and Kellen Blair during the height of the Great Recession, when money was tight for both theaters and theatergoers, so the duo opted for the cast of two, with minimal story lines, sets and costumes. And it works once you accept the fact that the show is campy, the story quirky, the musical numbers corny and that the ending arrives before the whole thing becomes tiresome.

Who did the dastardly deed to whom? In the end, it doesn’t matter a whit.