‘Shear Madness’ at the New Theatre Restaurant is a wild comic romp

Theater is an ephemeral art and that fact alone makes it an unusual form of entertainment.

At any given performance you know it won’t be exactly the same as the night before. And tomorrow’s show will be different yet again.

That’s especially true of “Shear Madness,” which is settling in for a long run at the New Theatre Restaurant. The audience-participation murder mystery, played strictly for laughs, is filled with scripted puns and malapropisms, but the real fun kicks in when the audience is invited to help “solve” an off-stage murder. When the viewers begin volunteering clues, the players have to be ready for split-second adjustments.

This show, which was created by Bruce Jordan and Marilyn Abrams from a humorless German-language play, is always set in the city where the performance takes place.

The action at the New Theatre unfolds in the Shear Madness Unisex Hair Styling Salon on the Plaza. The characters include hair stylists Tony Whitcomb (Ron Megee) and Barbara DeMarco (Cathy Barnett), a couple of undercover police detectives (Jim Korinke and Craig Benton), a customer named Mrs. Shubert (Dodie Brown) and a guy named Eddie Lawrence (guest star Richard Karn), who presumably is there for a haircut but apparently has an off-the-books relationship with DeMarco.

The beauty salon is downstairs from an apartment occupied by the landlady, a once-famous concert pianist named Isabel Czerny. We never see her but her piano-playing is audible during the early part of the show. When Czerny is found murdered, the undercover cops reveal themselves and launch an investigation.

The script has given the audience enough clues to reasonably conclude that any one of the two stylists and two customers could have done the deed. Ultimately, the viewers are asked to vote for the character they believe to be the killer.

On Thursday night that turned out to be DeMarco, who delivers a confessional monologue explaining why she decided to do in the old lady upstairs. But as Korinke told the audience just before his final exit, at the next performance the killer could be somebody else.

Korinke has played Inspector Nick O’Brien repeatedly since the the late 1980s and he handles the character’s duties as emcee with a professional poise that looks utterly effortless. Benton is very good as his dim-bulb second banana. Barnett gives us one of her most memorable comic turns as DeMarco. Brown exhibits her usual sharp timing.

Megee is as over the top as we’ve ever seen him. And Karn makes the wise decision to play Eddie with low-key deadpan humor, allowing his fellow actors to fill up the stage with antic energy.

The structure allows the performers a certain amount of leeway to ad lib and the highlight at the Thursday show was a crazed interlude in which Megee, playing a gay hairdresser who declares that he’s a “protype, not a stereotype,” goes off on an improvisational tangent that is difficult to describe. What I do know is that his fellow actors visibly struggled not to laugh.

Megee has been giving us crazed performances of this type for years at smaller theater companies, but I’m sure it seemed new to many in the New Theatre audience. Let’s just say that nobody in the cast energizes the stage the way Megee does.

Part of the fun happens before the play actually starts, as Barnett busies herself sprucing up the salon and Megee gives Benton a real shampoo. I don’t know what the white goo is that Megee squirts onto Benton’s head, but this bit of pure slapstick is quite funny.

Keith Brumley’s scenic design, rendered in vivid colors, is a nice piece of work and Randy Winder’s lighting is effective. Indeed, all technical aspects of the show are polished to a high sheen.

If you’re in the market for “pure entertainment,” then this just may the show for you.

The production continues through Jan. 18 at the New Theatre Restaurant in Overland Park. For ticket information, call 913-649-7469 or go to NewTheatre.com.

This story was originally published November 14, 2014 at 10:58 AM with the headline "‘Shear Madness’ at the New Theatre Restaurant is a wild comic romp."