How Did This Make it to a Broadway Tour? Haven’t got a Clue by Mabel Weismann

 How did this make it to a Broadway tour? Haven’t got a Clue.

A cult classic movie was murdered on Tuesday night. In the Orpheum. With bad acting. By, well, almost everyone. The beloved 1980s movie Clue (and the 1940s board game) was adapted into a play in 2017. This brand new national tour launched in Minneapolis, running here from February 27 to March 3, hasn’t yet solved some of its biggest crimes: the script, direction, cast and costumes are haphazard and shocking. 

The first glaring problem seems to be the script by Sandy Rustin, with additional material by Hunter Foster and Eric Price. Three people turned out to be a case of too many cooks in the kitchen when they wrote the jokes, and none of them seemed to land. 

Besides the less-than-ideal script, the team didn’t have much luck saving it with the acting or directing. The overall production, directed by Casey Hushion, felt lazy. She opted for predictable gags and elbowed the audience in the ribs when something was supposed to be funny. The story is undeniably campy, which is what made the movie so lovable. But when campiness is blown out of proportion, and actors overact every line, it is exhausting. But, perhaps I was in the minority, because people came to see the movie on stage, and applauded when they heard the lines they wanted to hear. The ensemble cast was lackluster, except Mark Price, who held the show together as the memorable Tim Curry role, the butler Wadsworth, nailing his impressive monologue recapping the entire show in the last scene. 

In contrast to the rest of the production, the most intriguing part proved to be the set, designed by Lee Savage. The floor mimicked the Clue game board, and the different iconic rooms slid out from the wings. But, if the set, an element of the theater designed to support a show as a backdrop, is the best part of the entire production, something must be seriously wrong.

Not all the design elements were up to par. The costumes were inconsistent and confusing. Only one character was costumed in her namesake color costume: Miss Scarlet wore red, but the rest were in colors corresponding to different characters, or colors that didn’t fit the names at all. I wished they would’ve stuck to going all out with the character’s colors or completely disregarded it, because it ended up being confusing to see Mr. Green wearing purple. 

All this begs the question: why this is on tour as a Broadway-caliber show? While many shows that succeed on Broadway are based on movies, books, or other source material people know and love, Clue, while it fits into that people-pleasing ticket-selling category, may not find similar success, or maybe it will. Non-theatergoers get a chance to enjoy theater toned down for their tastes. And maybe this production of Clue is perfect for exactly that. 

Clue feels like a script that deserves a life in high schools or community theaters, but perhaps not a national tour, and certainly not Broadway (a place it has, in fact, never been.)