A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder
Opening Night: November 17, 2013
Closing: January 17, 2016
Theater: Walter Kerr Theater
When Monty Navarro, the black sheep of the D’Ysquith family, finds out he is ninth in line to inherit a dukedom, he decides to eliminate the other eight heirs standing in his way — all played by Tony Award winner Jefferson Mays. Set in England’s elegant Edwardian era, this witty music hall comedy explores how low we’ll go to make it to the top
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November 17, 2013
While the source material credited for A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder is Israel Rank, an Edwardian novel by Roy Horniman published in 1907, the show’s key inspiration lies in the film adapted from that book, Kind Hearts and Coronets. That wonderful 1949 Ealing Studios black comedy cast the incomparable Alec Guinness as eight English aristocrats standing in the way of a murderous commoner’s noble birthright. The virtuosic comic turn here belongs to Jefferson Mays, taking on dizzyingly quick changes of costume and characterization with hilarious aplomb. But that’s by no means the sole enticement of this toothsome new musical.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 17, 2013
Many actors would, if you’ll pardon the expression, kill for a great death scene. In A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, the new musical at the Walter Kerr, Jefferson Mays doesn’t have to draw a drop of blood to get more than a half-dozen of them. Bees, freezing-cold water, a heart attack, a gun, and oh so many more implements of destruction give the actor opportunity after opportunity to expire in spectacular, balcony-baiting fashion — oh, and evoke gales of laughter at the same time. That’s the really important part. In fact, it’s tough to remember another Broadway outing since Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore that’s derived so much gleeful entertainment in the hastening of mortality.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 17, 2013
Overkill has seldom been more enjoyable than in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, a thoroughly delightful and uproarious new Broadway musical about an Edwardian serial killer who could be a well-heeled cousin of Sweeney Todd by way of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves. His name is Monty Navarro (Bryce Pinkham, blessed with a crystalline tenor and the looks of a young Jude Law) and he’ll stop at nothing to avenge his late mother, disinherited by a titled British family for falling in love with the wrong sort. ”My father was ‘Castilian,’ he explains at one point. ‘And worse, a musician.’
READ THE REVIEWNovember 17, 2013
‘For God’s sake, go!’ warns the black-clad chorus at the top of A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder as they advise the more squeamish patrons who might be shocked at the evening’s gory dramatics to leave immediately. Don’t listen to them or you’ll miss a rollicking good time and a smashing Broadway debut for composer/lyricist Steven Lutvak, bookwriter/lyricist Robert L. Freedman and director Darko Tresnjak.
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November 17, 2013
Serial killers may be all the rage on bookshelves and television screens — so ubiquitous, you’d think they made up a major demographic of the world population — but they are comparatively rare in the peppier precincts of musical theater. Now, after a long dry spell, Broadway has a deadly sociopath to call its own. Please give a hearty welcome to Monty Navarro, the conniving killer who helps turn murder most foul into entertainment most merry in the new musical A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.
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November 17, 2013
How very daring — a witty musical about a serial killer that Stephen Sondheim didn’t write. Fashioned from the ingeniously absurd plot of the novel that inspired the classic Alec Guinness film comedy “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” proves an ideal vehicle for the versatile talents of Jefferson Mays. Reveling in his multiple roles, Mays plays eight wacky members of a noble family doomed to die at the hands of a distant heir who covets the family title and fortune. The English music hall format is the perfect performance style for this adorably wicked show.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 17, 2013
NEW YORK — This fall brings a number of opportunities to see celebrated actors juggle multiple personalities on Broadway. There’s Mark Rylance, playing Twelfth Night’s Olivia and Richard III in rep, while his fellow Brits Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart tackle 20th-century classics No Man’s Land and Waiting for Godot.
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