New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
The long and short of ‘Shear Madness’
Zany murder mystery set in hair salon comes to Ivoryton Playhouse
Shear Madness” is genuinely a rare bird, if not a paradox of the theater. This zany, murdermystery play set in a hair salon is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longestrunning play in U.S. history, yet relatively few theater aficionados have even heard of it.
“Shear Madness,” which opens Wednesday at Ivoryton Playhouse, ran in Philadelphia for 17 years, and has run continuously in Boston since 1980, and in Washington, D.C., since 1987. The play has been translated into 23 foreign languages, playing such global hot spots as Tel Aviv and Seoul for the amusement of over 12.5 million people worldwide.
Despite such commercial success and extraordinarily long runs around the country (it finally arrived in New York City in 2015 for an 18month run OffBroadway), “Shear Madness” is not as well known as other longrunning, intimate shows such as “The Fantasticks” and “Blue Man Group.”
Robert Lohrmann, who
directs Ivoryton’s production slated to run through Oct. 6, is not one to speculate why “Shear Madness” isn’t as readily known as other iconic shows that seemingly run forever. Yet, as one who has served countless productions as either director or actor (“I’ve played every male character in the play,” he explained matteroffactly) since playing Tony the hairdresser in Boston in the mid1980s, Lohrmann has a pretty good assessment of the show’s popularity.
“I think the thing that makes ‘Shear Madness’ work consistently is because it combines three things that people just love,” Lohrmann said before a recent rehearsal — “being entertained in a live theater, a good murder mystery and, most importantly, the audience gets directly involved in solving the crime.
“So, on any given night, we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said, explaining how the show remains fresh over the long haul. “It always changes.”
The journey of “Shear Madness” starts in the summer of 1976, when actors Marilyn Abrams and Bruce Jordan, starring in “I Do I Do!” in Lake George, N.Y., agreed to adapt a participatory German drama called “Scherenschnitt” into a harebrained comedy. Their adaptation, now titled “Shear Madness,” premiered at Lake George and, a few years later, took root in Boston.
According to Lohrmann, whose day job is riding herd on the capital production ensconced in the Kenney Center these past 31 years, “Shear Madness is highly improvisational. As with various mobile murdermystery companies, the action can slide easily left to right depending on the audience’s input.
“There’s lots of clues, lots of motives, opportunities that unfold onstage,” he said. “It’s up to the audience — the witnesses, we like to call them — to tell us what they think is important and challenge the suspects to defend themselves.”
“That, I think, is the fundamental reason why the show has worked so long,” Lohrmann said. “It’s unpredictable, and that’s compelling. And the audience members have as much power as the actors do.”
Lohrmann’s Ivoryton “suspects” include performers Jordan Ahnquist and Patrick Noonan, along with Lisa McMillan, Bill Mootus, Siobhan Fitzgerald and Lev Harvey.
Set designer Daniel Nischan, lighting designer Marcus Abbott and costume designer Liz Saylor comprise the design team.
Lohrmann has been with the show long enough to know that his first order of business in discussing his bread and butter play is to shatter the myth that “audience participation” is by conscription, like it or not!
“People are reluctant to see a play if they read ‘audience participation,’ ” he said. “Nobody likes audience participation because they’ll be humiliated: They’ll be singled out. And it’s not like that at all.
“That’s one thing we’ve shied away from the very beginning,” Lohrmann said. “Nobody is forced to participate. if you want to sit and watch, you can. But once that investigation starts, and people around you begin to participate, I guarantee you’ll want to join the fun.”
Given the play’s improvisational nature, Lohrmann has several vivid memories of varying insanities that have found their way into the show, as when one of the characters had to perform the second act in his “tidy whities” after his trousers were “confiscated for lab work.”
For counterpoint, Lohrmann also remembers a performance during the 1990s in which he played Tony that included a small group of elderly theatergoers. In character, Lohrmann struck up a conversation with a woman in the group.
“She spoke with an accent,” he said. “I asked her where she was from, and she said she was from Poland. And I said, when did you come over to the United States? She said just after the war. I said that must’ve been interesting. ‘Yes,’ she said.
“Then she said, indicating her husband and herself, ‘We’re survivors,’ ” Lohrmann said, “meaning, of course, survivors of the (concentration) camps.
Then the woman’s husband asked Lohrmann’s Tony how he liked the movie “Schindler’s List.” Lohrmann replied in the affirmative. The older gentleman grew quiet for a few seconds.
“Then he said, ‘We were on Mr. Schindler’s list,’ ” Lohrmann said, continuing: “‘Mr. Schindler saved our lives. If not for Mr. Schindler, we would be dead now.’
“That’s a direct quote,” Lohrmann said.
A tad later, the woman with the accent called Lohrmann over to chat again.
“‘I want to tell you something,’ ” he said, channeling the woman, “‘what you’re doing is wonderful.’ ”
Before Lohrmann finished making light of it in his best Tony inflection, the woman persisted.
“‘I’m serious,’ the woman interrupted. ‘If we laughed at a joke, we believed we could live for another hour.’
“Some days,” Lohrmann said, “when I wonder why I do this crazy little play, I remember those words.”