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On Stage: A Gentleman's Guide To Love And Murder

If you're a fan of comedy...and musicals...and romance...and murder, the Theatre League of Wichita is serving it up in the form of the award-winning A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder.

Set in London in 1907, A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder features the central character Monty Navarro, who discovers after the death of his mother that in contrast to their hardscrabble life together, his mother was actually an heiress who defied her family by running off with Monty's Castilian father. Further, Monty finds that he is eighth in line to an earldom—which might be just the thing to keep his social-climbing girlfriend from leaving him for someone richer.

As Monty gleefully makes his way up the line of inheritance, dispatching stuffy relatives right and left, the audience is treated to a tour de force performance by a single actor, who plays not just Monty, but his relatives, as well. Each “accident” that befalls the heirs is more outrageous than the one before, and these scenes provide a feast of physical humor. Everything seems to be going according to plan—the only complication seems to be the feelings that he's developing for a distant cousin who is not in the line of succession.

The show was nominated for 10 Tony awards in 2014, and won four, including Best Musical and Best Book. The Theatre League of Wichita is putting A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder onstage at Century II Concert Hall from April 17 through April 19. 

Sanda Moore Coleman received an MFA in creative writing from Wichita State University in 1991. Since then, she has been the arts and community editor for The Martha's Vineyard Times, a teaching fellow at Harvard University, and an assistant editor at Image. In 2011, she received the Maureen Egan Writers Exchange prize for fiction from Poets & Writers magazine. She has spent more than 30 years performing, reviewing, and writing for theatre.