THEATER REVIEW : ‘Smoke & Mirrors’: Illusive Originality

Watching “Smoke & Mirrors” at the Long Beach Playhouse Mainstage, you can imagine playwrights Will Osborne and Anthony Herrera junking out “Columbo” and “Murder, She Wrote” episodes and plumbing the scripts of “Sleuth” and “Deathtrap.”

Their whodunit, written in 1991, is such an overt pastiche of these and every other popular murder-mystery-comedy of the past 20 years that you stop expecting anything surprising in their plot and start tallying up the references.

The pastiche approach could even work if it was a coy sendup, or something self-referentially smart like Charles Marowitz’s “Sherlock’s Last Case,” produced on the Mainstage last year.

But the only shock about “Smoke & Mirrors” is that Osborne and Herrera believe they have come up with an original angle.

Commercial theater, which survives on staples such as this, is so far behind the times that it doesn’t realize commercial TV has progressed way beyond Lt. Columbo and on to FBI agents Mulder and Scully investigating “The X-Files.”

It’s a sad moment when TV is leaving theater in the artistic dust, but, minutes into this hackneyed plot of murder and revenge among movie-making collaborators, it can’t be denied.

Cool, in-control director Hamilton (Gene Ober, understudy for Emory Davis) wants to do just a few changes to Clark’s (Mark Bucksen) screenplay--on the insistence of Derek, the star (Bill Vetro).

Derek is a kind of Jean-Claude Van Damme with Tom Cruise-like box-office clout, so everyone hates him. Hamilton and the ever-hyper Clark appear to be planning Derek’s murder, but when the bloody deed happens, Clark realizes he’s been double-crossed by Hamilton and his publicist wife, Barbara (Mary Tuck).

As we all know, though, where there’s a double-cross, there must be a triple-cross, and the play’s pallid sense of suspense and comedy (seldom has a Hollywood subject been so lamely satirized) signals that the formula will be dutifully followed.

There’s even a Columbo-like character--Sheriff Leroy Lumpkin (Patrick Flaherty Emmett)--a good ol’ boy and the local law who always has one more question.

Amid the mechanical goings on, director Russell St. Clair’s cast sometimes finds human touches.

Ober is a fine representative of understudies everywhere: His Hamilton feels totally his own, a smooth operator who thinks he controls all the smoke and mirrors. Bucksen’s Clark lapses into grating whining, but he has a better sense of comic timing than Vetro or Tuck. Emmett does a credible Southern Columbo, a thinking man’s redneck.

R. Todd Parker’s set and Bob Ashby’s lights strain for an Agatha Christie mood, and St. Clair doesn’t solve the (probably insoluble) problem of blocking and movement on this theater’s extreme thrust stage.

* “Smoke & Mirrors,” Long Beach Playhouse Mainstage, 5021 E. Anaheim St., Long Beach. Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m. Sunday matinees April 21 and May 5, 2 p.m. Ends May 18. $10. (310) 494-1616. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

Gene Ober/Emory Davis: Hamilton

Mary Tuck/Marilyn Watt: Barbara

Mark Bucksen: Clark

Bill Vetro: Derek

Patrick Flaherty Emmett: Sheriff Leroy Lumpkin

A Long Beach Playhouse production of Will Osborne’s and Anthony Herrera’s mystery-comedy. Directed by Russell St. Clair. Set: R. Todd Parker. Lights and sound: Bob Ashby.