Theatre in Review: Shear Madness (New World Stages)It has taken 35 years for Shear Madness to make it to New York -- and now we know why. Okay, I got that out of my system. If success is hard to argue with, Shear Madness is a real conversation-stopper. In 1980, Marilyn Abrams and Bruce Jordan got their hands on a Swiss crime potboiler with interactive elements and hoked it up into a murder mystery/farce/parlor game called Shear Madness. It opened in Boston, purportedly as a New York tryout, but the two producers quickly sussed out two important facts: (1) they had a real audience show on their hands, and (2) there was no point in sending it to New York, where the likes of Frank Rich and John Simon would grind it up into so much chopped liver. Instead, they nurtured the Boston production into a hit of Mousetrap proportions while establishing equally successful long-runs in cities like Washington and Chicago. It is also currently running in Seoul and Paris; the latter production is known as Dernier Coup de Ciseaux. Finally, the siren call of Manhattan proved impossible to resist, and the producers have found a likely berth for Shear Madness at New World Stages, where it is ensconced comfortably among such neighbors as The Gazillion Bubble Show; Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus; and Avenue Q, now in what seems like its 75th year. Shear Madness pretends to be a play, but don't you believe it. The action takes place in a hair salon at 50th Street and Ninth Avenue (near New World Stages), run by the swishy hairdresser Tony Whitcomb, an idea that may have been funnier during the Reagan Administration, but I doubt it. Tony and his tough-talking associate, Barbara, are attending to a pair of customers: Eddie Lawrence, a faintly sinister businessman, and Mrs. Shubert, an East Side grand dame. Upstairs is the elderly female concert pianist whose storied career ended in a burst of stage fright; the old lady turns up dead -- stabbed repeatedly with a pair of hair-cutting scissors -- and a pair of cops start grilling the suspects. The first portion of Shear Madness is written like a Mad Lib, allowing for the insertion of dozens of topical references. This leads to any number of thudding jokes about Phantom of the Opera, Groupon, Yelp, Lamar Odom, Kanye West -- and a real clunker about Jared from Subway. Even that was better than the moment when Tony tells Barbara, who is recovering from fainting, "You passed out faster than one of Bill Cosby's dates." But the real point of the evening begins when the audience is invited to vet the suspects' accounts of their movements during the expository scenes. After the intermission, we are allowed to quiz the suspects, and, after an audience vote, a killer is selected, and one of several possible endings is played out. The interactive sequences are a little more amusing, in a Colonel Mustard-in-the-library kind of way, and it should be noted that Patrick Noonan, as one of the cops, works the audience with tremendous aplomb. (Really, the entire company does.) The audience enjoys catching the suspects in lies and ferreting out hitherto unknown details. At the performance I attended, a guy seated down front asked to see the contents of a cache of secret letters that is central to the plot, but, having had a few, his reading skills were slightly impaired. Among other things, he pronounced "chord" using the "ch" sound from "chew," and, aided by Noonan's comments, brought down the house. Call it the Theatre of Milton Bradley -- and it probably helps that New World Stages allows you to bring cocktails back to your seats, because at this show a margarita or three couldn't hurt. Aside from Noonan, Jordan Ahnquist delivers each of Tony's lame jokes as if it were a real zinger, Jeremy Kushnier is properly shifty as Eddie, Kate Middleton uses a well-honed Brooklyn accent to sharpen her comebacks as Barbara, and Lynne Wintersteller, with a real gleam of mischief in her eye, gets more laughs than she has any right to as Mrs. Shubert. ("That must have sounded suspicious," she says, looking as guilty as mortal sin.) Adam Gerber is fun as Noonan's sidekick, who keeps copious notes while the suspects prevaricate. Also, Will Cotton's scenery and lighting and the sound design of Bruce Landon Yauger, which relies heavily on a playlist of '70s and '80s hits, are suitable to the occasion. A show that will appeal to bachelorette parties, groups spending a night on the town, and others looking for a few laughs -- but who are not necessarily interested in the theatre per se -- Shear Madness is essentially beyond criticism. The audience at the performance I attended had a fine time. I was aghast, then mildly amused -- and I voted with the majority for the killer. -- David Barbour 
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