Death By Chocolate, Derby Dinner Playhouse's dumbed down, current offering, recalls those simple-minded corny senior plays that small town and rural high schools used to do. Surely they are choosing better things these days. This comedy/mystery, set on the eve of the reopening of a posh health resort in Pennsylvania's Poconos Mountains following the supposed suicide of its previous owner, is loud, frantic, and agonizingly unfunny as it hammers home every cliche of the genre. The acting is deliberately broad (what other choice would a cast have?) with lots of winks, puns, pratfalls, and pauses to flag the jokes for the audience. One admires the energy of the ensemble, but is overacting really that fulfilling?
Heightening the in-your-face unsubtlety are the heavy-handed names given to some characters (caricatures?) - Edith Chiles (Rita Thomas) for Julia Childs, Dick Simmering (Brian Bowman, effusively and epicenely flamboyant) for Richard Simmons, Margaret Daniels (Janet Essenpreis) for Harry Truman's daughter, not to mention a secretary named Dyslexia (Bridget Thomas, with her Bernadette Peters voice in the show's most appealing performance), and an up-tight factotum called Alfred Maalox (J. R. Stuart). They're all holed up, temporarily isolated because a storm knocked out a bridge, in the resort hotel where the new owner, Lady Riverdale (Sandra Simpson, in an over-the-top performance to top them all), is trying to pull everything together. Lady R. has placed a box of the chocolates she manufactures on the desk of her newly-hired manager, John Stone (David Lewis).
As the plot coagulates, it takes Stone and Lady R. quite a while to figure out that both Edith Chiles, the cook, and Ralph Deadwood (Bill Hanna), the gym manager who is blackmailing Lady R. For her past life as a stripper, fell dead after eating chocolates from that box. Eventually the murderer is revealed in a free for-all ending.
A bigger mystery is that that neither the program nor the press release tells us who wrote this play. Whodunit? A better question would be Why?
