EDMONTON -- Remind me not to call the Jagged Edge Lunchbox Theatre a tiny struggling company any more. Tiny, they still are - struggling they're not.
The final two weeks of the run of their last show Beaten to Death By Gorillas, a hilarious send-up of all those pulpy, black-and-white '30s jungle dramas, played to full houses. Extra chairs had to be added.
And deservedly so.
The new production from the brown bag theatre is, however, another movie.
Boiling Point is an attempt to recreate the dark seductiveness of film noir. This one has all the moves, some properly clenched dialogue but neither the heart nor attitude of the originals. In an effort to duplicate the tone, Boiling Point forgot to be funny.
It's not that playwright Stewart Burdett hasn't done his homework. He has obviously marinated his brain on the late shows. He loads his script with overheated '50s dialogue and B movie characters, but then director Matt Kowalchuk has his actors play so broadly it's not so much a case of good guys gone bad as just plain bad acting.
The action takes place in Burdette's (yeah, he designed the set too - also the sound and the poster) tacky, white, vaguely '50ish diner run by Pop (Wayne Friese). Two hoods, A (Andrew Bursey) and B (Kris Loranger) enter, looking for Swede. He's going to have $50,000 on him and they're gonna wait in the kitchen and pop him when he shows up.
Then she walks in. The blond (Chloe Chalmers) with the big boyfriend (Gerrard Everard) and the big mouth. "The cheaper the hood, the gaudier the patter,'' she says. "A dame like you could mean trouble,'' observes one hood, who must have seen a few noir movies himself.
By the time the hour is over, the stage is filled with bodies as double crosses become triple and quadruple crosses. In fact, there are so many double crosses, one character comes back from the dead to get just one more in before the cops arrive. All of this is delivered with a heavy, hammy manner and without much regard for sense. Film noir didn't always make a lot of sense - it was more about atmosphere and attitude - but at least it followed its own internal logic.
The characters are not funny enough to behave with such disregard for motivation, and not real enough to be taken seriously.
It's as if Burdett is trying to pile every old crime drama he's ever seen into one short act, and the vehicle is just too slender to support all that weight.
What we need here is a little wit to illuminate the play - you know, such as the neon sign with the missing letter flashing just outside the window of the sleazy hotel.
Boiling Point runs Wednesday to Friday at noon, and at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, at the Jagged Edge Theatre on the top floor of Edmonton Centre through March 18.
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