Review: SPIDER’S WEB at Group Rep At Lonny Chapman Theatre

Agatha Christie is perhaps the most successful and prolific mystery writer in history. Nicknamed the Queen of Crime, she wrote 66 detective novels and 14 short-story collections, introducing the world to household-name detectives like Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, garnering countless accolades, and spinning off TV, stage, and film adaptations of her books. Branching out into theater, opening “Black Coffee” in 1930, she went on to create the longest-running play in history, “The Mousetrap,” which has been running nonstop in the West End (barring a temporary closure due to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic). Now, her second-longest running show, SPIDER’S WEB, has been revived by the Group Rep at the Lonny Chapman Theater to delightful results.

Clarissa Hailsham-Brown (Ava Oran) is a flighty and imaginative diplomat’s wife. She and her husband, Henry (Joshua Lang), and his daughter from a previous marriage, Pippa (Eils Avalos), are staying in a country house they’re renting. When a body shows up dead, their tranquil lives are thrown into turmoil and everyone they know is a suspect.

It’s a classic set-up and the script is charming and chilling by equal measures. Director Mareli Mitchel-Shields leads an appealing cast through the fizzy murder-mystery. SPIDER’S WEB benefits from the comedic sensibility that runs through the script, which isn’t to say the case to find the murderer isn’t suspenseful, and with invisible ink, hidden doors, and secret drawers, you’d be forgiven for wondering if Nancy Drew was  going to stumble onto the stage. But that’s the fun of it.

The costumes by Shon LeBlanc are excellent and the set design by Chris Winfield is beautiful and practical, the drawing room needing to open onto several other parts of the house. The cast is uniformly good with Carol Kaufman as a crabby gardener, Reed Michael Campbell as a lovable goof, and Lloyd Pedersen as one of the houseguests as particular standouts. But it’s Oran who grounds the whole show. If Clarissa had been portrayed as a true bubble brain, it never would have worked. But Mitchel-Shields and Oran give her shades of intelligence and depth that make her bright performance even bubblier. 

The show runs a little long, but it’s a fizzy couple of hours and it will absolutely keep you guessing. This is one spiderweb you won’t mind getting caught in.

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