Information

Show Credits: Music by Stephen Flaherty
Book by Lynn Ahrens
Lyrics by Lynn Ahrens

Description:

Tony Award winners Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty exploded on the musical theatre scene in 1988 with their first off-Broadway show, LUCKY STIFF. Based on the novel The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo by Michael Butterworth, LUCKY STIFF is a zany, offbeat, and very funny murder mystery farce complete with slamming doors, mistaken identities, six million bucks in diamonds, and a corpse in a wheelchair.

The story revolves around an unassuming English shoe salesman who is forced to take the embalmed body of his recently-murdered Atlantic City uncle on a vacation to Monte Carlo. Should he succeed in passing Uncle off as alive, Harry Witherspoon stands to inherit $6,000,000. If not, the money goes to the Universal Dog Home of Brooklyn, or else to the gun-toting wife of the casino owner! First produced at Playwrights Horizons off-Broadway (Richard Rodgers Award) the show later went on to win Washington's Helen Hayes Award for Best Musical, and is now performed frequently across the country.

For complete information on this and  other Ahrens and Flaherty shows, as well as links to purchase CDs, vocal  selections and other publications, please go to www.AhrensandFlaherty.com.

Accolades/
Awards: The prestigious Richard Rodgers Production Award for new musicals, 1988.

Insight from the experts Staging Tip: AUTHORS' NOTES:

DOUBLING PARTS: Although you may want to assign each of the small supporting parts to a different actor, we think alot of the fun of LUCKY STIFF comes in seeing the same four people playing a myraid of comic characters. It's almost magical when a raucous English landlady transforms herself seconds later to a prim secretary, and seconds after that into a Puerto Rican nurse. We learned in our first production that the fast offstage costume changes can be frantic, so please be kind to your actors and use a lot of Velcro!

SETS: The script is written in a filmic way with fast scene changes, and many different locales, so the simpler, more stylized and fluid the sets, the better. The Playwrights Horizons production used sliding panels which opened and closed to indicate different places, and painted cutouts to create atmosphere--a palm tree for outdoor Monte Carlo, a giant eye chart for the optometrist's office, a spinning propeller for the airplane, etc.

CHARACTERS: We've found that LUCKY STIFF works best when the characters are played with real conviction. Don't let them turn into cartoons, you'll have a funnier show.

SOME SPECIFIC SOLUTIONS: In the Playwrights version of the "Day Around Town Dance" in Act I, ensemble people physically became the different sights and activities that Harry and Annabel encountered. For instance, when they went shopping, one man WAS the clothing store. (He wore a stack of hats, a suit made out of ties and pocket handkerchiefs.) Similarly, another actor became a dancing portrait in a museum, and still another was a dancing roulette wheel. This is one stylized solution which eleiminates the need for additional sets. The nightmare in Act II was done with blacklighting, and glow-in-the-dark dog masks, each mask styled so that you could recognize the character. (Dominique Du Monaco was a poodle with long eyelashes and a feather headdress; Uncle was a bulldog with dark glasses and a hat; etc.) Again, this is only one solution.

In the Club Continentale, cutout silhouettes of people were used to give the feeling of a crowded club full of romantic couples.

UNLCE: We feel Uncle should be played by a live actor and not a dummy, if at all possible. It's funnier, darker, and more shocking to see a real person in that wheelchair. You can also have a lot of fun with "Uncleography"--choreographing small moments in whih he can lurch forward on a fast stop, bounce in rhythm to the train's motion, etc. Int the New York production, all VOICE OF TONY HENDON sections were taped.

BLACKOUTS:The fewer better. We tried to eliminate most blackouts, and only kept them when absolutely necessary. We like scenes overlapping. In a few places where we did use a blackout, we used taped voice-overs and music to cover the blackout. If you can eliminate the need for these blackouts in your production, so much the better.

PACING: We like it breakneck, and have tried to write the show that way. "LUCKY STIFF" is a bubble that ought to be kept in the air at all times.

OUR best wishes for a great production.

Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty