Daily Archive for October 3rd, 2005

Thought this was pretty interesting.

Entertaining characters make “˜Appointment’

ALEC CLAYTON
Published: September 30th, 2005 12:01 AM

Agatha Christie’s “Appointment with Death” at Lakewood Playhouse is not a typical whodunit.
Oh sure, it has many of the standard elements: a large group of people thrown together (in this case, on a tourist excursion to the Holy Land) and a murder with multiple suspects. But there are not so many suspects as in the usual mystery romp, and they are not killed off one by one in the standard fashion.

The murder doesn’t even take place until close to the end of the play, and by then the audience has little doubt about who is going to be killed. A good half of the audience would probably like to do the deed themselves, because the victim is such an evil old “¦

Well, I won’t say more, even though the identity I’d be giving away is no great mystery ““ the point being that this is not a plot-driven mystery; it is character-driven entertainment. And there are characters galore.

It’s a motley crew that comes together in the King Solomon Hotel in Jerusalem and travels to the red cliffs of Petra. There is the flirtatious Italian girl (Stacey Todd), who flits in and out unnoticed by all but the hard-drinking and boisterous Alderman Higgs (played with gusto by Dave Van Arnam). Others in the cast include the smarmy Jefferson Cope (Patrick C. Schroeder); the self-possessed doctor, Sarah King (Season Luben); the flighty Miss Amabel Pryce (Val Kirkwood); Dr. Theodore Gerard (half Sigmund Freud and half Hercule Poirot, as played by Tom Phiel); the British and oh-so-haughty Lady Westholme (Brynne Garman); the comical Dragoman (Michael Dresdner); the inspector Col. Carbery (Michael Osier); and a couple of Bedouin boys played by Ike Weileman and Jesse Dawson. That still leaves the pathetically ludicrous American Boynton family ““ the evil and manipulative Mrs. Boynton (Lynn Geyer); the sweet Ginevra Boynton (Beth Meberg), who has been convinced by her mother that she is insane; Lennox Boynton (Tim Goebel), who is about as insane as you can get and not be put in a straitjacket; Lennox’s wife, Nadine (Lorrie Fargo), who is torn between love for her husband and her infatuation with Cope; and finally the kindly and innocent Raymond Boynton (Steven Thomas).

As the play was adapted for the stage, Christie wisely took her famous detective Hercule Poirot out of the script. As a result, the murder mystery is secondary to the enjoyment of watching the eccentricities of these many characters unfold.

We see Lennox Boynton fall apart before our eyes, as Goebel plays him with a marvelous set of ticks and twitches, wringing his hands and never making direct eye contact with anyone on the set or in the audience.

We see the shy and innocent Raymond blossom into a love ­struck young man. We see him stand up to his fears and succumb to them again ““ and then stand up again with Dr. King’s encouragement. Thomas, who played a similarly lovestruck youth, Slender, in “Merry Wives of Windsor,” seems made for the part.

We see the ex-prison warden mother Boynton abuse and manipulate her children, and we want to strangle her (Geyer is outstanding as Boynton).

We bristle at the spiteful Lady Westholme, and we want to see her get her comeuppance. We feel compassion for Lennox’s wife, Nadine, and understand that, burdened as she is with such a dysfunctional husband, she can easily fall for the slick Jefferson Cope. And finally, we laugh at and with the marvelous Dragoman because Dresdner plays the part with such flair.

The one bothersome aspect to the performance was that it was far too obvious that some of the actors were acting ““ most noticeably Schroeder, and to a lesser degree Phiel.

“Appointment with Death” is an entertaining story presented with style under Marty Mackenie’s skillful direction .