Writers' Notes
by Philip LaZebnik and Kingsley Day
Our friend Paul Hough returned from a season of summer stock in the Midwest with horror stories. Everybody had hated the director and wanted to murder him. “Why don't you guys write a murder mystery set in a summer stock theatre?” he asked us. “It would make a great musical.”
It was such a brilliant simple idea we wondered why nobody had thought of it before. While we had other commitments and couldn't start writing it until the winter, possibilities began coming to us right away.
The show we ended up with takes place over a three-week period at the archetypal summer stock theatre. The company is rehearsing a different show in each act (the previous week it was The Mikado), and in this pressure-cooker atmosphere people start getting killed. Within the play, the shows are rehearsed and presented: the ultimate summer stock versions of a Frimlesque operetta, a Cole Porter-type potpourri and a musical drama a la Sondheim. The visiting “stars” are crazed and eccentric; crisis upon crisis threatens each curtain; tempers flare; sex rears its ugly head; actors drop like flies. In short, anyone in the theatre will recognize some of his or her own experiences in stock.
The mystery going on “offstage” is played straight, and when the opening night audience in Chicago feverishly debated the identity of the killer during intermission, we knew we had succeeded. Apparently the critics thought so, too. Summer Stock Murder went on to a record-breaking run, and won eight Joseph Jefferson Citations. Paul Hough, whose idea it had been in the first place, directed and, happily, survived the run.