Dial 'M' for Murder
Reviews
American Stage, St. Petersburg,FL
January, 2006

From the Sarasota Paper: Herald Tribune  (FULL TEXT BELOW SUMMARY)

“Dial 'M'' will have you on edge of your seat”

“It's 3-D enough to scare the bejesus out of an audience at the tiny American Stage, where the seating wraps around the set:

“Director John O'Connell creates a mood most ominous and menacing through his cast and some careful background music that heightens the drama, all of which plays out in the blue-gray living room of the couple's upper-middle-class flat in London.”


From the St. Petersburg Times: (FULL TEXT BELOW SUMMARY)

“Director John O'Connell has drawn an excellent performance from his cast”

“O'Connell also did the sound design, and he put a lot of creative energy into underscoring dialogue with snippets of typically portentous movie music, a clever touch.”

 

FROM THE HERALD TRIBUTE OF SARASOTA:

'Dial 'M'' will have you on edge of your seat By SUSAN L. RIFE

susan.rife@heraldtribune.com ST. PETERSBURG --
You can hardly turn around without tripping over a dead body on TV these days. Between "Law and Order" and the whole "CSI" business, it's just bodies, bodies everywhere.

To find the modern roots of such mystery and crime-scene drama, you logically would go back to Agatha Christie and the master of horror movies, Alfred
Hitchcock, who had a huge hit with the movie version of Frederick Knott's play
"Dial 'M' for Murder" in 1954.

Starring Grace Kelly as a London society woman who is the target of a murder
plot by her jealous tennis-pro husband, Ray Milland, the film was an early
exploration of 3-D moviemaking.

It's 3-D enough to scare the bejesus out of an audience at the tiny American
Stage, where the seating wraps around the set, placing the audience literally
in the living room in which Tony Wendice (Christopher Swan) plots to murder
his wife Margot (Katherine Michelle Tanner) after an infidelity.

When his plan goes awry, quick thinking on his part sends Margot to prison,
until Margot's lover (Brian Shea), an American who writes murder mysteries for
television, and Inspector Hubbard (Doug Landrum) pick apart the plot.

Director John O'Connell creates a mood most ominous and menacing through his cast and some careful background music that heightens the drama, all of which plays out in the blue-gray living room of the couple's upper-middle-class flat in London.

The story is largely Tony's, and Swan, last seen at American Stage in "The War of the Worlds," is smooth as glass as he hires an old school acquaintance as his hitman. Swan has a particularly expressive face, and it's fascinating to
watch him suppress this feeling or that as circumstances change.

There's an especially intriguing frisson of energy between Tony and his
hitman, Charles Alexander Swann, aka Captain Lesgate (Byron Patterson), as the two dance delicately around the topic at hand.

Tanner is terrific as a young woman with conflicting emotions about her
marriage. Her terror while and after she is attacked is palpable on every
level; when the police come and she defers to Tony as he explains what
happened, her misery becomes more evident by the second.

Shea is strong as Margot's former lover and ultimate rescuer, although he
begins to slip into a stereotypical private-eye kind of delivery of his lines
in the second act that doesn't match his earlier demeanor.

Landrum's Inspector Hubbard cracks the case in true murder-mystery style.

 

DIAL 'M' FOR MUSTY; [SOUTH PINELLAS Edition]JOHN FLEMING. St. Petersburg Times. St. Petersburg, Fla.: Jan 25,

Copyright Times Publishing Co. Jan 25, 2006

Dial "M" for Murder, the Frederick Knott thriller now playing at American Stage, is like what the novelist Graham Greene (no mean writer of thrillers himself) used to call an "entertainment," a lightweight piece of work, as opposed to his more ambitious books. 

Of course, most people attending the play will be familiar with the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock movie, starring Ray Milland as the smoothly conspiring husband, Grace KellY as the wife and Robert Cummings as the writer. It's fun to see how the material that was transplanted to the screen (Knott wrote the screenplay) comes across onstage.

There's not much difference. Both play and movie are exceedingly talky and fastidious about having every clue and red herring laid out just so. Actually, the American Stage production, with an elaborate living room set by Michael Dayton and smart costuming by Angela Hoerner, is more attractive than the movie.

Director John O'Connell has drawn an excellent performance from his cast. Christopher Swan, as ex-tennis pro Tony Wendice, is the perfect cad, madly calculating on the fly as he tries to cover his tracks under the dogged interrogation of Inspector Hubbard (a bearded, portly Doug Landrum).

Katherine Michelle Tanner has a great look, wearing the tailored outfits of Margot Wendice with elegance and understated sexiness, and her plummy English accent is straight out of Rebecca; she would have been a fine Hitchcock heroine. Brian Shea, as Margot's lover, Max Halladay, has just the right mix of caginess and eye for the main chance you would expect from a tweed-jacketed American TV mystery writer.

The one portrayal that seems off is Wendice's blackmailed accomplice, Captain Lesgate, who is played by Byron Patterson with an upper lip so stiff that he can barely talk and tamp down his pipe at the same time.
O'Connell and his cast are plainly trying to have things both ways with Knott's old-fashioned play. On the one hand, they revel in every last twist and turn of the narrative, belaboring long,wordy speeches that leave nothing to the imagination. There are times when all the Holmesian deduction becomes too much, and you couldn't care less if Tony is going to get away with his
crime.

Dial "M" for Murder also provides an opportunity for tongue-in- cheek humor, and this makes up a subtext to the performance, with the broadening of gestures - an eyebrow raised askance here, the oily eagerness in the reading of a line there - growing to the point that a mannered, ironic style dominates the second act. It is a promising approach to such a potboiler, but the
performance lacks the ultimate degree of tight, up-tempo timing that would completely succeed.

Unlike the tour de force of this form, Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth, which keeps spoofery and an engrossing whodunit in exquisite balance, Knott's less-than-classic play never transcends its convenient lapses in logic. So many plot turns strain credulity. Would the police really investigate Margot's stabbing of Lesgate without having more than a few words with her before she retires to the bedroom? And all the stagey bits of business about a key are just too corny, no matter how crucial to the denouement.

Still, the show does entertain. O'Connell also did the sound design, and he put a lot of creative energy into underscoring dialogue with snippets of typically portentous movie music, a clever touch. (Hollywood composer Dimitri Tiomkin supplied the score for Hitchcock.) It almost makes you want to track down the old movie for a fresh viewing.