Photo courtesy of Benjamin Laird Arts & Photo
Vertigo Theatre’s season opener Farewell My Lovely draws so much from the world of cinema you almost forget you’re watching live theatre.
The cinematic style is established at the very beginning of the show with projections that run like film credits and a murder in shadowed silhouette that starts the story rolling. Haunting black-and-white close-ups of women lips and curling smoke punctuate the production adding a mysterious almost dream-like quality to the story. A smoky jazz score — courtesy of Dewi Wood — further sets the mood evocative of the sexy sordid underbelly of 1941 Los Angeles.
Fans of film noir will appreciate the many hallmarks of the genre — from the hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe (Graham Percy) to the femme fatale Helen Grayle (Jamie Konchak) to the dumb-in-love gangster Moose Malloy (Beau Dixon).
The cast does a stellar job of portraying these film noir archetypes melding the aspects of caricature with real emotions. The character work by Dixon and Anthony Ingram as Marriott and Amthor is particularly memorable.
Percy has big shoes to fulfill as Marlowe considering the likes of Robert Mitchum and Humphrey Bogart have portrayed the life-hardened detective. And while Percy doesn’t fulfil my visual stereotype of Marlowe he imbues him with that witty cynicism and self-loathing that Raymond Chandler fans would expect and that makes the character larger than life. Chandler wrote the novel Farewell My Lovely in 1940 and this production by Aaron Bushkowsky marks the story’s first adaptation for the stage.
The plot itself is typical film-noir fare. Malloy hires Marlowe to track down his lady love Velma a nightclub singer who runs with a rough crowd and is rumoured to be dead. Throw in an attractive young woman Annie Riordon (Emma Slip) who uses her wits to rescue Marlowe from more than one scrape; a faded belle Jessie Florian (Lucia Frangione) who’s drowning life’s disappointments in alcohol and could be murdered for what she knows; a lazy police detective Detective Nulty (Stephen Hair); and a fraudulent psychic involved with the disappearance of a rare jade necklace and you’ve got Farewell My Lovely.
As with many film-noir stories the plot is obvious and anticipated yet it’s not. There are twists and turns and character shifts that you expect as "part and parcel" of the genre but the specifics of which you don’t necessarily see coming. If you think too hard about a few of these plot twists they won’t make real-world sense so don’t — just enjoy the ride.
Bushkowsky’s script is snappy witty and funny with seemingly a few modern winks at the genre; it makes me want to read Chandler’s original words and see how much of that humour is his and how much of it is Bushkowsky.
Even with an excellent cast and a great script this is one production where I feel the "star" of the show is really director Craig Hall and his production team — their stylized staging is what makes this show truly memorable.
It’s stylish. It’s slick. It’s sexy. In short it’s a must see.
Farewell My Lovely runs until October 19 at Vertigo Theatre.
