NOW ENTERING THE COMIC UNDERWORLD WITH THE BIG SLEEP
There’s more comedy than noir in Vertigo Theatre’s version of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, but that’s hardly a criticism.
Vancouver playwright Aaron Bushkowsky has a real knack for splattering his Philip Marlowe plays with chuckles and even some big laughs all the while his characters are disposing of one another right before our eyes.
Two years ago, Bushkowsky teamed up with Vertigo’s artistic director Craig Hall for Farewell, My Lovely — another Marlowe gritty crime thriller.
I remember chuckling, but I don’t think it offered as many hearty laughs as his The Big Sleep and I think that has a great deal to do with another key player in these Calgary Marlowe outings, our own Graham Percy, who plays the private eye with an eye for booze and broads.
Percy seems so relaxed and comfortable in Marlowe’s rumpled suits and loose-fitting trench coat and with all those delicious witticisms Chandler, funnelled through Bushkowsky, gives him.
Percy’s Marlowe has seen too much, loved too much, lost too much and drunk too much to be sentimental, so he’s the ideal private eye to be poking around the seedy underbelly of 1940s Los Angeles.
The show opens with a great tableau of Marlowe leaving the bed of not one but two women, or the tableau might be foreshadowing what faces Marlowe when he drives out to the estate of a millionaire known as The General played by Stephen Hair in one of two pivotal roles in the play.
Hair is a masterful character actor so when he plays The General as a man as fragile as his orchids but with power and money to manipulate events and people it’s a great set up scene for Marlowe’s latest case.
It seems The General’s youngest daughter Carmen (Jesse Lynn Anderson) is being blackmailed over some gambling debts.
Marlowe suspects there’s more to this blackmail thing than some bad luck at the blackjack table and he’s right.
Carmen is being blackmailed over some saucy photos her drug dealer takes when she is high on opium.
That little opium den is just one of several sleazy locales Marlowe will have to go to before he can satisfy The General that his youngest daughter is out of harm’s reach.
Then there’s The General’s older daughter Vivian (Mabelle Carvajal) — and let me just refresh your memory that the 1946 film version paired Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and rumours have it the off-screen sparks were as hot as the on-screen ones.
Most of the chemistry between Percy and Carvajal is in their dialogue. I’d have liked more sizzle in their body language and far more seductive costumes.
Anderson’s Carmen is a real little wildcat who simply oozes danger, so it’s no wonder even the womanizing Marlowe keeps his distance.
Carmen’s blackmailers turn out to be Joe Brody and Mona Mars, a pair of bumbling novices played by Curt McKinstry and Katherine Fadum and their scene with Percy is a showstopper, it’s so much fun.
McKinstry plays Joe Brody as one of those big dumb lunks that were in all the old crime novels and films and Fadum is Calgary’s version of Gloria Grahame, Shelley Winters or Diana Dors, those sexy blonds who could be as insatiable as they were ditzy.
Then there’s Joel Cochrane as the night club/casino owner and Mona’s husband and with just a couple of scenes Cochrane leaves his mark on this production as he is beginning to do for every show he’s in.
Scott Reid’s set with its moving panels and Jamie Nesbitt’s dynamite project designs are as much characters in this production as any of the actors and Reid’s lighting designs keep everything in just the right amount of shadow to let us know when we walk with Marlowe we’re walking on the wrong side of the tracks — and that’s part of the thrill of The Big Sleep.