MORE LAUGHS THAN GASPS IN VERTIGO’S THE THIN MAN
Dashiell Hammett is considered one of the greatest American writers of detective fiction of the 20th century and the grandfather of noir detective fiction.
Hammett gave us Sam Spade in the Maltese Falcon, the epitome of the hard-boiled, hard-drinking, hard-loving private eye.
He also gave us Nick and Nora Charles, the antithesis of Sam Spade. They knew how to drink as well and as much as Sam but they were tipping martinis and cocktails more often than whiskey.
Nick and Nora seemed to solve their mysteries as much by accident and coincidence as they did by sleuthing. Nick retired as a detective when he married Nora the wealthy San Francisco heiress and only took cases when they were thrust on him as is the case with The Thin Man, the duo’s most famous whodunit.
Vertigo and Saskatoon’s Persephone Theatre teamed up to commission playwright and actor Lucia Frangione to adapt Hammett’s The Thin Man for the stage. Her play is getting the kind of elegant design and staging Nick and Nora themselves would applaud.
The Thin Man is running in Calgary at Vertigo Theatre until Oct. 14 before it moves to Persephone later in October.
Nick (Curt McKinstry) and Nora (Nadien Chu) have come to Manhattan to celebrate Christmas. It’s the 1930s and prohibition is still in effect except that Nora’s money makes liquor as accessible as water. This means their hotel suite is always filled with party goers eager to drink the bottomless supply of booze.
During one such party, Nick glances at a newspaper to discover the secretary of inventor Clyde Wynant has been murdered and Wynant himself has disappeared, making him the prime suspect.
It turns out Nick and the secretary probably had a brief fling before he married Nora which explains why he is so distraught.
He’s also a friend of Clyde and doubts the man is guilty.
Before Nick and Nora can pour themselves a dozen or so drinks, Clyde’s whole family descends upon the hotel suite.
There’s Mimi Jorgenson (Katherine Fadum) his former wife and her new French husband Christien (Aaron Hursh). She’s one of those dangerous femme fatales, a bit worse for wear and he’s a gigolo out for what’s left of her divorce settlement. Nick has a bit of a history with Mimi as well.
Mimi’s drunken, gun-wielding daughter Dorothy and her eccentric, neurotic brother Gilbert (Christopher Duthie) also make appearances wanting answers to questions because it seems the secretary might have been stealing money from Clyde.
Herbert Macauley (Graham Percy), one of Nick’s oldest friends and Clyde’s lawyer also drops in to help Nick and Nora drink the expensive bottle of whiskey he was able to find on the black market.
It’s an extremely complicated plot which, to her credit Frangione tries to simplify, but there are still too many names being bandied about and too much history about each of them. It really would have helped if Vertigo had listed them all in the program and explained their relationships to each other, the inventor, his secretary and the criminal underworld.
The last to arrive is police inspector Guild (Kent Allen) whose bad cold is matched only by his bad attitude.
The first act is all exposition and it’s to the credit of director Courtenay Dobbie and her strong cast that the proceedings are not nearly as tedious and numbing as they could be.
Dobbie keeps the action moving at top speed. That door bell keeps ringing on cue to bring new people in and each of them is a flamboyant caricature from those wonderful old film noir thrillers.
Fadum has great fun playing a Shelley Winters-style floozie and Hursh oozes plenty of false charm. In anything but a play or movie, Duthie’s Gilbert would be certifiable but his quirkiness seems perfectly acceptable given his family situation which we get to see more of when Nick and Nora visit Mimi’s house in the second act.
It’s commendable to see how Frangione is able to keep all of the action of the first act in the hotel suite.
In the second act she takes Nick and Nora to a sleazy speakeasy where all the supporting cast members get to play lowlifes and then off to the inventor’s lab for some creepy midnight sleuthing.
What makes this The Thin Man so much fun, even if you stop trying to figure out who killed the secretary and the whereabouts of the inventor, are the performances of McKinstry and Chu.
They are a most unorthodox couple, whose verbal sparring is as charming as their numerous signs of affection. Between their barbs and witticisms they are forever kissing, cuddling and cooing.
Like their pulp and celluloid counterparts, McKinstry and Chu have a feisty terrier named Asta. She may be a puppet but, given that she unearths one of the most important clues, deserves the curtain call she receives.
The Thin Man is more a drawing room comedy than a noir thriller or a serpentine whodunit, meaning it will produce more laughs than gasps or head scratching.