Funny Business

The two plays opening last weekend in Ventura County--both comedies--show some of the diversity that’s available in local community theater: George Bernard Shaw’s high-toned “Don Juan in Hell” at the Santa Paula Theater Center and the Thousand Oaks-based Conejo Players’ considerably lower-brow “The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940.”

The latter, by John Bishop, is a parody of (among other things) the classic locked-room murder story: Several people are forced together in an isolated space, and they and the audience try to determine responsibility for the dead bodies that start to accumulate--presumably by the hand of one of those gathered.

Bishop adds color by giving the mystery a theatrical setting: Some actors, writers, a director and a producer have been called to the estate of a wealthy woman who they hope will finance their next Broadway show. The home is soon snowed in, power falters, and there is indeed a murderer--or is that murderers?--on the loose. But who? Or, for that matter, why?

This is the kind of show that, it would seem, couldn’t be played too broadly, although director Zachary Spencer and his cast certainly put that notion to the test. All the characters are caricatures to begin with, from the arch composer (Mark Fagundes) and lyricist (Erin Bordofsky) to the society matron played by LaVerne Kaufmann as if by Margaret Dumont in a Marx Brothers movie.

Most effective are romantic leads Kristin Henry as a young actress and Phil Otte as a wisecracking Bob Hope-style comic; Gary Romm as a singer so “Irish” he makes Dennis Day sound like Jimmy Stewart; and Kim Coger as the matron’s very efficient maid.

Far from the Conejo Players’ most ambitious work, “The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940” comes across with several solid laughs and happily brings actors Henry and Otte to the Conejo for the first time.

“DON JUAN” IN SANTA PAULA: When George Bernard Shaw wrote his 1905 “Man and Superman,” the then-topical reference was to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra”--and you know how lighthearted German philosophers are.

Still, Shaw’s discourse on sex, religion and creative evolution is strong enough that (beginning with actor-director Charles Laughton in 1950) one of the lengthy opus’ acts, a dream sequence featuring Don Juan and the Prince of Darkness talking with a woman from Don Juan’s past and her father, has frequently been performed as a self-contained piece, and often as a staged reading.

Such is the presentation by the Santa Paula Theater Center, under the direction of David Ralphe.

There are costumes (credited to Teri Hulbert), but mostly the characters do what the characters in most Shaw plays do: talk. It’s a wide-ranging discourse, containing both meat and wit as performed by a capable cast, including Ronald Rezac as Don Juan and Linda Livingston as Dona Ana.

“Don Juan in Hell” continues at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2:30 Sunday afternoons through Feb. 28 at the Santa Paula Theater Center, 125 S. 7th Street. Tickets for the Santa Paula run are $12.50; $10, seniors 55 and over and students; and $5, children 12 and under. For information, call 525-4645. The show then moves to the Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center, Fridays-Sundays from March 5-28. For information, call 581-9940.

“The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940” continues Thursday-Saturday evenings at 8 through Feb. 20 at the Conejo Players Theater, 251 S. Moorpark Road in Thousand Oaks. Admission is $9 Thursdays; $10 Fridays; and $13 Saturdays, with $1 discount for seniors and children 12 and under. For reservations or further information, call 495-3715.