Published: November 09, 2009 10:31 pm      

REVIEW: Clarksville Little Theater's 'Something Afoot'

We know pretty soon in “Something’s Afoot,” Clarksville Little Theatre’s musical spoof of Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Indians” mystery, that the butler didn’t do it.

After announcing to the houseguests who’ve answered his rich eccentric master’s invitation to a weekend at an isolated mansion that “Lord Rancour is dead, dinner is served,” Clive, the butler (Dennis M. Basham), dies on cue on a stair that explodes.

To hammer home the faux horror, the guests and remaining servants warble the title song, gasping that “if he didn’t do it someone else has had to do it.”

Standing in for Christie’s Miss Marple is a stylishly dressed Miss Tweed (Rita Hight), arch in manner and take-charge pushy. Her rush to judgment on whodunit keeps her scrambling for new theories.

Then people start getting knocked off one by one in surprising (well, not so surprising) ways. Who’s the last to go? Miss Tweed will never tell you.

The show had a brief Broadway run in 1976 starring Tessie O’Shea as Miss Tweed. Jean Stapleton played the part in a 1984 Showtime production on cable. Community theatres love doing it.

Keep an eye out for Lettie, the Cockney maid (Cathy Butler-Weathersby), and Flint, the Cockney caretaker (Josh Martin), who sing and dance uproariously to his suggestive boating song called “(I’ve Got a Tiny Little) Dinghy.”

Lauren McCombs is a charmer as blond eager-to-please ingenue Hope Langdon. She falls immediately in love with college boy Geoffrey (Brian Kennedy) who turns up uninvited. They’re Ginger and Fred as they dance to “I Don’t Know Why I Trust You, But I Do.”

As the bodies pile up, Miss Tweed directs that they be carried to the offstage library. When huge Colonel Gillweather (Michael Gaither) succumbed, the biggest laugh came after a man in the audience blurted out to his wife, “How are they going to carry him off?”

Director Alan Weller adroitly moved his cast through their campy rendezvous with death. Dennis M. Basham’s country house set could have come, appropriately, from countless other stage mysteries.

Brian Morris as Lord Rancour’s avaricious nephew Nigel, aided by Kathy Todd Chaney’s amusing choreography, was a skulking bounder as he pranced about searching for his uncle’s will while singing “(I’m) the Legal Heir.”

“The Man With the Ginger Moustache” was romance-prone Lady Grace Manley-Prowe’s confession, smartly sung by Grace Poganski, about her attraction to a long-ago lover’s facial hair.

With book, music, and lyrics by James McDonald, David Vos, and Robert Gerlach plus additional music by Ed Linderman, “Something’s Afoot” is a fun show but hardly a substitute for the real Dame Agatha.



• Performances are Nov. 6, 7, l2, 13, 14 at 8 p.m. and Nov. 8 at 2 p.m. Reservations at 812-283-6522.