A LULLABY OF MURDER
Tommy Gun’s Garage–a shrine to Chicago’s now-out-of-favor gangster days–has jumped onto the interactive bandwagon with A Lullaby of Murder. But unfortunately this show is a sleeper in the worst sense, its aliveness killed off by a silly script.
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So frenzied it verges on incoherence, the tedious first half fritters away interest by assaulting us with pointless pratfalls and an onslaught of period songs: “Life Upon the Wicked Stage,” “Sheik of Araby,” “Hooray for Hollywood,” “You’re the Top.” Appealing as these songs are, they seem to come from an entirely different show. The ballads (mostly written after 1929) come out of nowhere, tell us nothing about the characters who sing them, and offer no clues for audience sleuthing. And in one inept and deadly section a film segment–supposedly the rushes of the first day’s shooting–is shown in a silence broken only by what seem to be the actors’ desperate improvs. The film takes its own sweet time to tell us nothing.
