By Arlene McKanic
The play opens with the lounge singers, the fantastically frowsy Snooks Keene and her blind husband Howie (Amanda Doria and Cas Marino) immured at the Wild Moose Lodge with the soon-to-be-former proprietor, Joe Buffalo Dance (Michael Miller), a phony Indian. The lodge has been bought by the Holloways for its patriarch Sidney, and Mr. Buffalo Dance is being made redundant.
Attempts to evict the Keenes are less successful, and soon they're joined by the phony Nurse Dagmar (Susan Erenberg), sporting a cigarette holder and dressed in nurse's cap and the world's slinkiest black dress. Nurse Dagmar has been taken on to care for Sidney, who fell out of a window or something and has been in a vegetative state ever since. They're soon joined by the rest of the Holloway brood: Hedda (Mary Lynch), her elder daughter Lauraine (Monica Barczak), her husband Nelson (Jimmy O'Neill), Hedda's quasi-incestuous stoner son Stinky (Richard Gilberto) and her bratty, hyperkinetic little girl, Gay (the marvelous Alessandra Licul.) Of course, people scheme and counter-scheme to do each other in. Sidney's on his way out, the Holloways are filthy rich, and getting one's hands on the loot trumps familial love in a major way. The murder plots seem to nest in each other like Russian dolls, and nothing is as it seems.
Clearly the cast had great fun putting this mess together – if you're stuck with material this bad you might as well enjoy yourself. Doria is a scream as Snooks, as is Marino as the hapless Howie. His misdirections might not be politically correct today – at one point he wields a gun, and Snooks has to guide him to shoot the perp with her foot – but who cares?
Erenberg's Nurse Dagmar outdoes Dietrich with a sexy wickedness, and is possessed of a loud and long scream to boot. Barczak's Lauraine is a delightful grasping idiot, O'Neill's shifty Nelson surprises and Gilberto's Stinky is exactly that; his lust for his mom is creepy. The audience might find Lynch's Hedda strangely serene given the extent of the mayhem around her, but you learn that she's calm for a reason.
Miller is good and pathetic as the proprietor. Licul, dressed in a pretty, sparkly dress that becomes progressively smudgier as the play goes on, is so brilliant that you want to throttle her. When what happens to this beautiful, maddening child happens, you will cheer.
O'Neill's direction is frenetic, as it should be. Ian McDonald's set design is atrocious, as it also should be. There's a broken-down couch with a stain on a cushion, a door lined with tinsel, ghastly cantaloupe-colored walls with cracks in them, doors repaired with masking tape. Also pretty bad are Tommy Sommella's prop design.
For a while the reviewer thought that when the set's front door was opened the lodge's toilet started to flush, but it's actually the sound of an endless rainstorm. Good for sound designer Erenberg. Malini Singh McDonald's costumes are also appropriately tacky, and Doria, along with playing poor Snooks, designed the lighting. Her very last maneuver is the best. Ian McDonald is also the Moose Wrangler – so he's the chap who took down that incredibly ugly moose head from the wall when the lights went out!
Moose Murders is playing at the Trinity Lutheran Church, 63-70 Dry Harbor Rd., Middle Village, Jan. 25 & 26 at 8 p.m. and Jan. 27 at 4 p.m. Tickets are $14 for adults and $13 for seniors. Call 718-736-1263 for information and reservations.
