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‘A Killer Party’ Review: The Case of the Online Musical

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With broad winks to Agatha Christie and the limitations of remote theater, a serialized song-and-dance mystery goes on. Well, not so much dance.
I used to have high standards for new musicals. Relevance, craft and a reason for being were traits I looked for but often found lacking. Now that we’re in lockdown, I’m just happy to see talented people working on anything that doesn’t actively make me wish they weren’t. That’s a low bar, but by not aiming much higher “A Killer Party: A Murder Mystery Musical” handily clears it. The first three of its nine short episodes, now available to purchase on demand with the rest arriving soon, show it to be cheerful and slapdash and silly enough to compensate for an almost total lack of coherence. But maybe the lack of coherence is what makes it so cheerful. Online pandemic mystery theater — amazingly, there is already another example, in Andrew Barth Feldman’s “Broadway Whodunit” — is an unlikely medium with no best-practices guidebook yet. Any new musical more ambitious than this goofy lark featuring jaunty tunes and appealing Broadway performers like Laura Osnes and Alex Newell would likely sink at once. Which is a nice way of saying that the book, by Kait Kerrigan and Rachel Axler, is not the star here. A spoof of backstage comedies and Agatha Christie-style mysteries, it mostly exists, like an aluminum Christmas tree, as a way of displaying a few wacky ornaments as quickly and cheaply (and safely) as possible. The first episode is centered on one such ornament, Varthur McArthur (Michael James Scott), a puffed-up former Broadway child actor who played Gavroche in “Les Misérables” until his voice tragically changed. Now he lords it over an amateur theater group in Duluth, Minn., six of whose members sit down to dinner at his “killer party,” each bearing a ridiculous name and a motive to kill him.

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