Mass murder might seem an unlikely topic for a musical comedy, but the singing serial killer in "No Way to Treat a Lady" does have illustrious ancestors, from Mack the Knife to Sweeney Todd. The show now playing at Hartford's TheaterWorks is the third incarnation of this black comedy about a murderer with a talent for disguise and the Jewish cop who's chasing him. First it was a novel by William Goldman, then a 1968 movie starring Rod Steiger and George Segal. The musical version, with book, lyrics and music by Douglas J. Cohen, played Off-Broadway in 1996. It was revived by the Barrington Stage Company in the Berkshires last summer, and the Hartford version is a semi-reprise of that outing, directed again by TheaterWorks' associate director, Rob Ruggiero, and with two of the performers repeating their roles.
The cad who inspires the title's rebuke is Christopher Gill, a failed actor who sulks in the shadow of his recently deceased mother, a great Broadway star. She still looks down haughtily from her life-size portrait and scolds her son for his mediocrity. In a mad effort to get her posthumous approval -- and a notice in The New York Times -- he embarks on a killing spree, adopting a series of physical and vocal disguises to first charm, then strangle, a string of elderly women.
He's pursued by Detective Morris Brummell, a balding, Jewish bachelor still living at home with his own chiding and manipulative mother. Mo Brummell (there are lots of semi-in jokes in the script, one of which is that in this show the romantic lead is no Beau Brummell) has his own ambitions -- not only to get his name in the papers for solving a baffling crime, but above all to get out of his mother's house and into a relationship with legs.
Like a great deal of modern musical theater, Cohen's score owes more than a bit to Stephen Sondheim. But it also reveals a great fondness for the classic musical comedies of the fifties and sixties. In fact, one of the first lines in the show is a sly wink at "Damn Yankees." There's no lack of melody, but the score's great strength is its narrative thrust. Much of the story is told - cleverly and efficiently - in song.
Ruggiero's production at TheaterWorks has all the comic aplomb and musical panache of the New York version. It's also new departure for the theater: their very first musical, with a live offstage band under the leadership of musical director David Neals and an expansive set that tests the limits of the pocket-size stage. Designer Robert Bissinger has placed Brummell's office and Gill's apartment at extreme stage left and right, flanking a center dominated by an all-purpose door with multiple locks, which serves as the entrance to the multiple apartments in which the characters live - and die. Neals' final touch is an greenish scheme that makes all of New York, inside and outside, resemble some drab institutional interior.
Adam Heller is disarming and charming as Morris, a slightly rumpled, slightly klutzy, but thoroughly likeable police officer -- a kind of Columbo meets Barney Miller. It's this unassuming ordinariness that beguiles Sarah Stone, Morris's polar opposite: a chic shiksa with fashionable friends and loads of money. Eileen Kaden makes that attraction persuasive, with an appealing stage presence and a sweet soprano.
Bradley Dean is a tall man with a large voice, and on this modest stage he's sometimes overpowering: too big, too loud. But he's hugely funny and creepy as the killer, mowing down matrons in a dazzling repertory of disguises -- an Irish priest, a Latin dancer, a French waiter, a burly policeman, even a timorous transsexual.
But the real master of disguise here is Cheryl Stern, who plays all the killer's victims and both mothers. She's a great comedian and chameleon, moving effortlessly from the nagging yenta to the imperious prima donna, from a ditzy widow to a steamy tango-lover to a brassy barfly. All four cast members help to make this little show a big, big hit (it's already pretty well sold out); but it's Cheryl Stern who really knows how to treat a lady.