'White City Murder': New production brings back pre-pandemic Asaykwee musical

Gray box at black box: Ben Asaykwee and Claire Wilcher

Five years ago, in a country far away (it seems) from the present, just before COVID was on everybody's tongue and in the air they breathed, "White City Murder" debuted at the Phoenix Theatre, which is now finishing its 40th-season celebration in a performing-arts home with "Cultural Centre" formally added to the place's name.

On Friday night, a season-crowning production of Ben Asaykwee's virtuoso musical fantasy on the legend of H.H. Holmes opened. It's focused on Holmes' nefarious activity around the 1893 Chicago world's fair, which itself was a virtuoso fantasy of scientific and purported social progress, embodied in its white architecture. The pseudonymous Holmes was a 19th-century serial murderer (a side effect of his specialty as a con man and swindler) who established scary residence near the site of the thronged Columbian Exposition (the fair's formal name). His complicated life was filled with more secrets than the large gray chest of drawers at center stage of Phoenix's Basile Theatre might suggest. 

The adaptable black-box theater has patrons on four sides for a show that often brings the black-garbed cast of Asaykwee and Claire Wilcher to barely arm's length from the audience, though most of their work takes place on a sturdy, occasionally revolving disc at the center. 

Interaction with the attendees is a little less than I remember from the 2019 show, but just enough to display the cast's ad-lib gifts tucked into a tightly scripted parade of sung and spoken story-telling and Grand Guignol chills overlaid with rapid-fire comedy. Asaykwee and Wilcher are a brilliant, multifaceted team. If you're late returning from intermission, you might be gently mocked, but so will the audience for looking at you.

Asaykwee's creative panache allows room to see Holmes' victims sympathetically while at the same time directing satirical scorn at the American habit of well-funded boosterism and lavish entertainment. Of course, he can't resist a dig early in the show at the exhibition's 400th-anniversary commemoration of Columbus' "discovery" of the New World and a mention of its murderous legacy.

The creator takes turns at the keyboard to flesh out the songs he and Wilcher perform in full voice, well-coordinated and clearly projected. She's got the vocal oomph to make every line stunning and sustained. His voice has the advantage of ascending now and then to an eerie falsetto that is as secure as his normal range. In the second act, attempts to cue vocal samples entered live and preserved electronically as accompaniment failed several times opening night. No worries: "A cappella!" the actors shouted and proceeded to nail the song unaccompanied. 

The new production's lighting and set design take more of a "penny-dreadful" approach to the macabre proceedings, while the glare of the fair is not so conspicuously suggested as it was in 2019. The yellow journalism that made Holmes notorious after his capture and execution in 1894 is embraced by this "White City Murder" in stark, vivid projections. 

Thus, though a wealth of facts about Holmes is trotted out for the audience, Asaykwee and Wilcher occasionally appear to warn us and themselves explicitly: "This is not a documentary!" The Holmes legend alone is rich enough to spin songs around: "Show Them a Show" is a first-act production number whose sentiment is proved on the audience's pulses. It's also a summation of Holmes' credo that what you can get people to believe about you is all the reality a shrewd sociopath may need against the short-lived glamour of the White City.

[Photo: Phoenix Theatre]