‘Shear Madness’ is the original murder-mystery where the audience helps solve the crime

The cast and directors of Forum Theatre Company’s newest comedy believe it’s a cut above.

“Shear Madness” is part comedy, part murder-mystery and holds the Guinness World Record for longest-running play in American history. It began its life in Boston in 1980, with another company in Washington, D.C., following in 1987.

“This is a show unlike any other show I’ve ever worked on,” said Kathryn Page Hauptman, producing artistic director and the play’s director. “It is a show unto itself.” Local companies who produce “Shear Madness” must receive training from one of the show’s directors. Hauptman spent four days at the Kennedy Center in Washington, watching rehearsals, talking to the director and company members and viewing three different performances.

“I don’t think anybody could do it justice cold, without ever seeing it itself,” said Hauptman, who first saw a performance in the early 1990s.

“Shear Madness” is set in a beauty parlor in Wichita, in the same area of the city as its performance. Each company is required to make its setting local, as well as working in a number of local celebrity names and landmarks into the script.

“If it’s raining outside, we change everything to refer to rain. If it’s hot and sunny or a disaster or some catastrophe in Wichita, that’s all mentioned,” Hauptman said. “It’s very current on a daily basis.”

“It becomes like the audience is in on an inside joke,” assistant director Craig Benton said, “because it all takes place in the neighborhood where we’re putting on the show.”

Benton, a Derby native, was part of two casts of “Shear Madness” at the New Theatre in Kansas City.

“It is an ensemble show where everybody has to help out,” Benton said. “Everyone has to be mentally focused and paying 100% all of the time. It’s crazy.”

The cast includes Ray Wills, Jen Bechter, Tom Frye, Simeon Rawls, Charleen Ayers and Ted Dvorak.

Wills, a former understudy for Nathan Lane in “The Producers” on Broadway, becomes a de facto emcee of the play, fielding questions from audience members and corralling the voting when they select the murderer.

“The audience is allowed to help us solve the crime, so you never know what they’re going to ask or what evidence or what theories they might have,” Wills said. “I have to interpret that. Then they have to ask the suspects, the cast, questions. It’s kind of like rehearsed improv, if you will, and that’s fun for the audience. You never know what’s going to happen.”

Any of three different endings can take place, depending on the audience’s selection.

“There are more and more shows these days that use murder-mystery as an element of the plot,” Hauptman said. “This is the original, where it all started.”

Simeon Rawls plays Tony, the eccentric salon owner (“Simeon is a star,” Benton said. “Nobody knows it yet”).

“Because of the nature of the show and its ‘Clue’-like aspect, it’s fun working with each other, reconstructing the murder, coming up with the local jokes, fitting our own personalities into the jokes and into the character,” Rawls said. “Each character has a heightened intensity in what they’re trying to accomplish, but they’re also working together at the same time.”

Wills said he hopes Wichita theatergoers can break their stereotype of not attending a production unless it’s a well-known show.

“It’s funny, it’s laugh-out-loud funny,” he said. “It’s amazing to me that it’s not more well-known. It’s so funny, but because it’s never played Wichita, people don’t know it. Sometimes people don’t come out and take a chance on titles they don’t know.

“This one, man, take a chance because it’s worth it.”

‘Shear Madness” by Forum Theatre Company

When: April 25 to May 19; 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays

Where: Wilke Center, First United Methodist Church, 330 N. Broadway

Tickets: $17 for opening night on April 25; $23 for Thursdays and Sundays; $25 for Fridays-Saturdays. Available at 316-618-0444 or online at forumwichita.com