No genre with any merit completely dies out. Just when TV variety shows seemed to go the way of the dodo, oddball revue-style programs popped up all over cable, and radio melodramas have made a comeback of sorts in various cities. Television and movies were thought to have killed the live-action thriller, what with the darkness of a movie theater or the solitude of a living room thought to be more conducive to chills than a room full of jaded theatergoers. But lo and behold, last season's celebrity pairing of Quentin Tarantino and Marisa Tomei jolted the box office of Wait Until Dark, and audiences even yelped at John Tillinger's arid revival of Night Must Fall a few months back. Does three make a trend? It may, if John Pielmeier's Voices in the Dark continues to make audiences wail and tremble the way they did when I saw the show (just after opening).
Not that Voices is any good. Pielmeier gets some of the thrills right -- it's hard to screw up the premise of a woman alone in a cabin with a psycho running about inside -- yet on some level he's forgotten the fun. Sure, you need exposition and lots of build up before you unleash the false alarms and full-blown mayhem (even the delicious Wait Until Dark drags a bit early on), but there's something too sour about Voices. Though the lead character, Lil, talks a suicidal woman out of jumping, this radio host isn't terribly interesting or sympathetic, and the handymen who do odd jobs around her cabin are relentlessly irritating.
Peter Bartlett, so funny in The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, is brought on to liven up the first act with bitchy wisecracks, but his character (Lil's agent) is pointless, and the one-liners are deader than the body who winds up in Lil's jacuzzi. No, I won't give anything else away, because once you get past the atrocious exposition scenes (and steel yourself for the show's occasional excesses of crudity and sadism), you'll probably gasp, jump and ride with it. It helps that Judith Ivey's a pro (albeit a strident one), and Zach Grenier, as a ridiculously unprofessional police officer, is both creepy and oddly likeable. More fun characters like him, and the trend might balloon into a craze.
