By Robert Nesti

We have yet to see Matthew Lombardo’s new farce When Playwrights Kill, so we don’t know if actors will be tripping over a corpse (or corpses) on the Huntington Theatre stage. But the title alone suggests a hybrid of two theatrical genres: the backstage drama about putting on a play, and one of the most enduring theatrical forms, the murder mystery. It got us to wondering whether there are any antecedents. And, guess what? There are. Here are a few:

Curtains

Body count: 3

This John Kander and Fred Ebb musical from 2007 is a spiritual cousin to When Playwrights Kill. It is also set backstage at a Boston theater during the tryout of a show heading to New York; but the theater is the Colonial (now the Emerson Colonial), the year is 1959, and the show is a Western-themed musical entitled Robbin’ Hood of the Old West. Both shows share diva troubles. In When Playwrights Kill, it is leading actress Brooke Remington (Beth Leavel), an Oscar-winning star whose antics are making playwright Jack Hawkins’s dreamed-of Broadway success less and less likely. (Jack is played by Tony-winning actor Matt Doyle.) In Curtains, it is the star Jessica Cranshaw, a much-hated diva who turns up dead in this musical-within-a-musical. Investigating the crime is Lt. Frank Cioffi, a Boston police detective who happens to be a musical theater aficionado. It’s as if Columbo wandered into The Drowsy Chaperone.

Ben Brantley in the New York Times called the character of Cioffi “the best damn musical theatre character since Mama Rose in Gypsy, and the best role of David Hyde Pierce’s career.” Pierce won a Tony Award for the musical, and the show ran fifteen months. Based on a concept by Peter Stone, it had a book by Rupert Holmes (The Mystery of Edwin Drood), music by Kander and lyrics by Ebb. It marked the final collaboration of Kander and Ebb. Sadly, Curtains has never played the Emerson Colonial.

The Phantom of the Opera

Body count: 2

Perhaps the ultimate backstage murder mystery is also the longest-running musical in Broadway history. Andrew Lloyd Webber, Richard Stilgoe, and Charles Hart’s adaptation of the 1910 novel by Gaston Leroux isn’t a whodunit, rather it’s a romantic thriller with a disfigured title character living in the subterranean depths of the Paris Opéra. He harasses the company performing above in order to further the career of a soprano he has been secretly coaching and desperately loves, then embarks on a terror spree in which he commits two murders — which seems low considering the mayhem he causes. At one point he crashes an enormous chandelier onto the stage while the company is taking bows, but no one is physically harmed. But that falling chandelier makes for great spectacle.

The musical opened in London in 1986 under the inspired direction of Harold Prince and ran through 2020, when it closed due to the Covid pandemic. It reopened in July 2021 in a slightly reduced production that Webber has said is “substantially identical” to the original — though there are changes. On the plus side, the show is using state-of-the-art technology with a lighter chandelier that falls faster and has numerous new lighting effects. While the 38-piece orchestra has been cut in half, advanced technology compensates by making the sound more immersive. And the iconic gold proscenium has been stripped of its statuary, including its mobile angel, allowing for more seating in the boxes adjacent to the stage.

It opened in New York in 1988 and ran until 2023 for a run of 13,981 performances. To celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2012, a production with new sets and staging toured North America; more recently, another tour was launched using the configuration of the current London production. This no doubt will please hardcore Phantom fans who miss Maria Björnson’s sumptuous sets and Prince’s dazzling staging — a combination that clearly resonated with audiences for four decades.

Redhead

Body count: 1

Redhead ran a season and was quickly forgotten, though it won six Tony Awards, including Best Musical in 1959, and awards for stars Gwen Verdon and Richard Kiley, and for director-choreographer Bob Fosse. This “murder mystery musical” was created as a vehicle for Verdon, Broadway’s hottest star of the mid-1950s, having won three Tony Awards (1953, Can-Can; 1955, Damn Yankees; and 1957, New Girl in Town); and it was staged by Fosse, her husband, in an auspicious solo directing stint.

Set in 1880s London, Verdon played a maker of wax figures in a museum run by her aunts, where a red-headed American showgirl has just been murdered by a red-headed killer. Falling for the victim’s partner, Verdon disguises herself — first as a man, then as an elegant red-headed performer — to track down the murderer. Aside from the uniqueness of its concept, the show also allowed Fosse to display what became known as his signature style in subsequent hits such as Chicago and Sweet Charity. It remains one of the few Tony-winning Best Musicals yet to receive a Broadway revival. 

Me and Juliet

Body count: 0
(An attempted murder fails)

Richard Rodgers had hoped to capture the spirit of his hits with Lorenz Hart with this 1953 musical comedy, a sharp departure from the groundbreaking musicals he had written with Oscar Hammerstein II (Oklahoma!; Carousel; Allegro; South Pacific; The King and I). Hammerstein was cool on the idea but felt he owed his partner one after the experimental Allegro failed. The result was a “putting on a show” musical that, oddly enough, features an attempted murder at its first-act curtain. This happens when a jealous backstage technician learns that the woman he had been dating is seeing another actor in the company. After shining a spotlight on them kissing, he drops a sandbag hoping to hit the actor but hits only a prop tray instead.

Given the Rodgers and Hammerstein track record, Me and Juliet had the highest advance ($750,000) of any show up to that point, but it proved enormously expensive to operate due to the seamless movement between onstage and backstage action. It had the shortest run of the team’s musicals to that point, running 358 performances, though it turned a small profit. Still, it was considered a letdown from a partnership that had revolutionized the American musical over the previous decade.

Getting Away With Murder

Body count: 7

Admittedly, not a backstager — it is set in the rundown office of a psychiatrist in an abandoned apartment building on New York’s Upper West Side. But its dynamic — a group therapy session — is abundantly theatrical. The murder victim is a renowned psychiatrist, Dr. Conrad Bering, whose body is discovered by the seven patients who meet weekly for a group session. But instead of calling the police, they set out to solve the crime themselves.

This makes the list because it was co-written by Stephen Sondheim, working with actor-writer George Furth. (They had previously collaborated on Company and Merrily We Roll Along.) As Sondheim fans know, he had a great love of puzzles and interactive games. One was called The Murder Game, which he played with his friends, then adapted (with his friend Anthony Perkins) into the 1973 film The Last of Sheila, a mystery where playing the game turns deadly for a group of Hollywood A-listers. For this play, Sondheim and Furth label each character with one of the Seven Deadly Sins, with clues to their identities embedded in their names; unlocking which character embodies which sin is the key to identifying the murderer. But Sondheim and Furth surprised many by revealing the murderer’s identity at the end of the first act, with a second act focused on whether any of the others would survive as the murderer systematically sets out to eliminate them.

Despite its highly regarded authors, a respected director (Jack O’Brien), and a cast that included Christine Ebersole, John Rubinstein, and Terrence Mann, Getting Away With Murder bored the critics. “The biggest shock is the flatness of the writing,” wrote a blunt Clive Barnes in the New York Times. It closed after 17 performances.

Vampire Lesbians of Sodom

Body count: 1?
(A sacrificial virgin becomes a vampire)

In the early 1980s, no community needed a major dose of camp nonsense more than New York’s queer audiences. It came in the person of Charles Busch, the drag performer and connoisseur of old movies, who wrote short plays for a gang of friends. One was a short skit performed at the Limbo Lounge deep in Alphabet City that parodied rival movie-star divas, and it became an overnight phenomenon.

Busch expanded the piece and moved it to Greenwich Village, where it was paired with another of his plays (Sleeping Beauty, or Coma) and ran for five years. His play is a campy epic spanning centuries, beginning in ancient times when a young virgin is to be sacrificed to a glamorous vampire known as The Succubus (played by the irrepressible Julie Halston). The young virgin (played by Busch) becomes a vampire herself — and is furious, seeking revenge over centuries.

Cut to Hollywood in the 1920s, where the rivalry between the two continues. Halston plays the vampy movie star La Condesa, while Busch is Madeleine Astarte, an actress wannabe out to conquer her rival’s domain. Sixty years later the pair are at it again, this time backstage in a Vegas club where Halston is Magda Legerdemaine, a showbiz star in the mold of Ann Miller, and Busch is Madeleine Andrews, a rising star on the Strip. After much bitchy bickering, the two call a truce, and the play ends with the final fanfare from the film Gypsy, one of the countless camp references that pepper the play.

Busch’s influences were many — from Oscar Wilde to Charles Ludlam to the careers of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead, and Barbara Stanwyck — yet his voice was unmistakably his own. Campy, silly, defiant, and unmistakably queer, Busch made a generation of queer men laugh unabashedly during a deeply stressful time. Too bad an enterprising producer didn’t pick it up and move it to Broadway as a vehicle for some great divas. Imagine if Chita Rivera and Liza Minnelli had starred in it instead of The Rink.

Will When Playwrights Kill move on to New York? With its hilarious concept, stellar cast of Broadway veterans (including three Tony Award winners), high-calibre production team, it seems ripe for the move. And it would be a sweet way for Lombardo to show that a playwright can kill — not with a loaded weapon, but with wit and talent.

When Playwrights Kill runs through April 18 at the Huntington Theatre, 264 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA. For tickets and more information, visit the play’s website at this link.

Watch the trailer for When Playwrights Kill: