Vincent Kartheiser is as limp as the play itself in period drama ‘Billy & Ray’

For a textbook example of how to botch a great subject, see Billy & Ray. It’s not that the show’s terrible. Rather it’s dull. Dishwater dull. Stare-into-space-while-the-clock-ticks dull. All this for a play inspired by the making of Double Indemnity — film noir at its slinkiest, wittiest and most sophisticated. Vincent Kartheiser, struggling to free himself from his devious Pete Campbell persona on Mad Men, looks completely lost as Billy Wilder, the Austrian-born director whose accent Kartheiser botches badly. It’s 1943, and Wilder and producer Joe Sistrom (Drew Gehling) want to adapt James M. Cain’s crime novel into a flick.