One of the funniest and most beloved American comedies of all time,Arsenic And Old Lace is getting a splendid production at Derby Dinner Playhouse. In lesser hands the 1941 play -- about two dear old ladies who with the best of intentions murder elderly single men -- could come off as creaky, dated, and somewhat offensive. But Derby's fabulous cast breezes through the evening with a sure-fire knack for mining comic gold. Sisters Abby (Rita Thomas) and Martha Brewster (Debra Babich) reside in a big old Brooklyn house where their grandfather once concocted patent medicines.
The minister who lives next door says the "virtues of another day live in this house" with its tea-time rituals and genteel atmosphere. What he doesn't know is that graves in the cellar hold the bodies of 11 old men (a 12th is temporarily stored in the window seat) who were taken in as lonely boarders and dispatched with poisoned elderberry wine to put them out of their misery. Nephew Teddy (J. R. Stuart), a harmless madman who lives with his aunts, thinks he is Teddy Roosevelt and dresses and acts accordingly. To Teddy the victims of the dotty spinsters have succumbed to "yellow fever" at the Panama Canal, which he is digging in the cellar. As someone says of the Brewsters: "Insanity runs in the family. It practically gallops."
The really bad egg in the Brewster family is another nephew, long-absent Jonathan (David Myers), who turns up after having done some murders of his own in other countries. He now looks like scary Boris Karloff (who actually played the part in the original Broadway production) as the result of Dr. (not Albert) Einstein's (Cary Wiger) botched plastic surgery job to change his face. Nephew Mortimer (Brian Bowman), the only sane member of the Brewster clan, is a drama critic who plans to marry Elaine Harper (Janet Essenpreis), daughter of the minister next door. Bowman's double-takes as bit by bit he learns what his aunts have been up to are hilarious. And the lines playwright Joseph Kesselring gives him to denigrate critics ("I can save time if I write my review on the way to the theater," Mortimer decides at one point) are delicious.
Kudos all around to the cast, director Georgette Kleier, and costume designer John P. White.
