In one of two double-feature radio-plays this month, the Long Beach Shakespeare Company (LBSC) dramatizes two love-related murder-mysteries with “Pat Novak for Hire” and “The Thin Man,” based on a Dashiell Hammett novel. Each entertains with distinctive characters and dialogue amid greed, gunshots and declarations of love.
Joe Montanari confidently directs LBSC’s six-member cast from the KBRD radio station inside the Helen Borgers Theatre in Bixby Knolls as they read from scripts and create sound effects such as the gunshots, bar scenes, fistfights and footsteps running through rainy alleys.
In “Pat Novak for Hire,” Pat Novak (Matt Brown) sets the stage with a description of his office on the seedy San Francisco waterfront, complete with the sound of seagulls and moody keyboard music composed by Montanari and performed by Sarah Hoeven.
Novak is a boat repairman who does gritty detective or other work for a fee. He is hired by the alluring Leigh Underwood (Hoeven) who wants him to “frighten” a man named Dixie Gillian (Nick Bosy) by brandishing a gun.
The best thing about the piece is that its dialogue drips with double-entendres and slightly weird metaphors and similes, such as, “I’ll dirty you up like a locker-room towel,” and “She walked with the nice, easy swing of a satisfied leopard,” followed by, “For a small leopard, she had pretty good spots, too.”
Aside from some sexism, some of the dialogue—originally written to air on radio beginning in 1946 in San Francisco and nationwide in 1949—might sound somewhat racist today, such as “like trying to follow a grain of rice in a Shanghai suburb” or “Jocko was more at home than a vulture in Calcutta.” But the dialogue overall creates a fun, hard-boiled detective feel.
Jocko (Montanari) is Novak’s hard-drinking Irish friend whom he solicits to help figure out who shot Dixie while Novak was trying to scare him. The plot becomes more complicated in terms of who killed whom and why when secret microfilm gets thrown into the mix.
After the cast performs a clever radio commercial for the Historical Society of Long Beach, one of LBSC’s sponsors, we move onto “The Thin Man,” a more upper-crust murder-mystery involving sleuthers Nick and Nora Charles, reminiscent of the rich married couple on television’s “Hart to Hart.”
Former detective Nick (Montanari) and his wife Nora (Jo McLachlan) get drawn into a mystery during their friend Arthur’s (Brown) wedding at a swank Manhattan hotel when the groom reveals someone has been trying to shoot him and new wife Jane (Amy Paloma Welch).
“Shots don’t mean a thing,” Nick says reassuringly. “Unless they hit you.”
Nick and Nora agree to take the couple’s place as newlyweds at a fancy hotel, first having to convince a skeptical bellhop named Honeymoon Harvey (Bosy, in one of his most entertaining parts) that they were just married.
Soon they meet an array of similarly colorful characters: Bingo, a cabaret dancer who loves Arthur; the hissing Snaky Simon (Bosy), who knew Jane before she married Arthur; and George the Germ, a germaphobe and possible linchpin to the whole mystery.
Overall, LBSC’s double-dose of murder-mysteries in “Pat Novak for Hire” and “The Thin Man” offers a charming summer diversion. The talented performers seem to enjoy their characters’ strange personas and various accents, executing their roles confidently and cleanly. And seeing these radio plays performed offers an intriguing behind-the-scenes glimpse into how they were first heard on “the wireless” more than 75 years ago.
Long Beach Shakespeare Company’s “The Thin Man & Pat Novak for Hire” tickets can be purchased at LBShakespeare.org for $25 per household for unlimited streaming through Aug. 1. Also available to stream through Aug. 1 is another LBSC double-feature, “Ellery Queen & Dick Tracy,” reviewed by the Signal Tribune last week.
