One of my earliest memories going to a movie theater is seeing Clue on the big screen. It not only started a lifetime love of Tim Curry, but cemented the Parker Brothers board game as the only board game little me ever wanted to play. And it still remains as a formative moment in my love of a good story told or performed well.
And that is what the Mercury Theater’s current production of Clue did once again. I actually brought my youngest child, about the same age I was when I saw the movie, and I delighted in watching her delight almost as much as I enjoyed the production…because boy, it’s delightful.
Just like Tim Curry in the film version, Mark David Kaplan as Wadsworth the butler steals the show, his expressions and physicality leading us down the fun and thrilling corridors of the mansion he mans. Wadsworth welcomes six guests for an evening of mystery and murder, and each character brings the mayhem.
Jonah D. Winston’s Colonel Mustard is all buffoonish bluster, towering over the cast in both size and sonority. McKinley Carter’s Mrs. White is over the top, as are Nancy Wagner’s Mrs. Peacock and Andrew Jessop’s Professor Plum, caricatures of characters we know as people even if they were once just brightly colored plastic play pieces. Mr. Green, played by Kelvin Roston, Jr., adds a sense of fear, even if I remember how the story ends for him. But both my daughter and I agreed that the most fun character (and the one we fight over being when playing the game) was Miss Scarlet, played with sizzle and swank by Erica Stephan.
Well, Miss Scarlet would be the swankiest and most sizzling person onstage if not for Honey West, most recently seen stealing scenes in the Mercury’s Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. The Chicago cabaret icon shows up throughout Clue, taking part in some of the show’s best slapstick gags.
Just like the time I had all those years ago watching the movie, as well as the hours and hours of fun the board game has given me, the Mercury Theater’s production of Clue—playing now through January 1, 2023—is every bit the hour or two of laughs and thrills and loads of fun that I remember from childhood.
