Tonight I went to see A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. You gotta give props to a show that features a murderer who basically has two girlfriends (the amount of cheating going on is ...debatable there) and you root for the guy anyway. Mostly because he’s charming and hot and it is kind of reasonable to think “well, given how he grew up....”

Monty Navarro’s Castilian dad died when he was seven, he and his mother grew up poor and she’s just died. His mom’s pen pal friend Miss Shingle drops in to tell him that his mother was a member of the famously rich D'Ysquith (pronounced close to “dies quick,” ahem) family and she didn’t want Monty to know she was disinherited for marrying his dad, but now she’s dead and Miss Shingle just thinks he should know....oh, and btw, he’s 8 people away from inheriting the family title. Monty contacts the family looking for a job and is rejected, and when he tries to meet his relatives, the first few at least are quite snotty and are all “we’ve never heard of your mother.”

After hanging out with the family priest and the priest uh...takes a tumble off a tower, Monty embarks on a plan of setting up accidental deaths for everyone in his way.* Causing one jerk and his girlfriend to fall through the ice, causing the gay beekeeper to get stung a lot, subbing in real bullets in a gun, a little “oops” with the heavy weights... etc, etc. One relative actually does give him a job and is nice to him, so Monty is relieved when that guy dies of natural causes. (Note: one guy plays all the family members who die, so there’s a lot of crazy costume changing.)

* There are two women in the line of succession in older generations, but since as I recall, women don’t inherit fucking jack in 1900’s England, I think that’s only for comedy purposes.

Monty also has some love life issues. His girlfriend Sibella loves him but is insistent on marrying someone else for money (they keep boning anyway), but when he meets his sweet cousin Phoebe (who thankfully isn’t threatening him in the line of succession), he also woos her after killing her brother. I definitely preferred Phoebe in this one, as she was freaking gorgeous and had gorgeous purple gowns, whereas Sibella is quite minx-y (and in this production, the actress seriously has lollipop head going on).

Finally we’re down to one remaining relative: the earl, who is obnoxious as fuck and his wife hates him, and the earl has a giant crazy meltdown at dinner, wants Monty to shoot him, and then drops dead. This time, however, Monty didn’t actually get to doing it...and may go to jail/die for it. What happened there? Let’s just say I liked the surprise reveal on that one.

So it was fun. Not a major laugh riot, but I enjoyed it.

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