As an avid musical historian, I admit I hadn’t heard of James McDonald, David Voss, and Robert Gerlach’s Something’s Afoot from 1972, but as soon as I found out that it was a parody of Agatha Christie’s And There Were None, I was intrigued.
I hadn’t had the desire to see a show at the 5th Avenue in years (West Side Story in 2019 was the last one I saw), but the ensemble cast of Seattle’s A-list talent is what got my attention, including Sarah Rudinoff, Brandon O’Neil, Adam Standley, Anne Allgood, and Allen Fitzpatrick.
When I attended the show on opening night (March 8), I find cause to praise to its young cast, including Jonathan Luke Stevens, Ashley Lanyon, and Porscha Shaw.
Here are some excerpts of an interview with Fitzpatrick, whose credits go back to Broadway and regional theater.
On being back at the 5th Avenue after six years:
Well, the last show I did at the 5th, which was my 26th show, was Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame in 2018. I mean, I was working away from Seattle in 2019… In March 2020, I was doing a show in Florida, which closed down immediately, because every theater in the country closed because of the pandemic. And so all through the rest of 2020 and 2021, that was pretty much a void for all actors in both stage and film.
And then 2022 rolled around, and I looked at the season and had a meeting with Bill Berry, the artistic director of the 5th Avenue, and we talked about some possibilities… I knew there was a role in Something’s Afoot that might be appropriate. So it seemed like a great [opportunity to] return to the 5th Avenue stage after a six-year hiatus…
I just want to say, it was a wonderful experience putting it together. First of all, there are some longtime veterans of Seattle theater in the show along with me, including Anne Allgood, Sarah Rudinoff, Brandon O’Neill, and Adam Standley, who’s younger than we are but has also made his mark in the theater scene here… It was really a fantastic experience to once again be on the 5th Avenue stage with these people whom I admire as actors and really respect and love on a personal level…
It was so much fun putting this show together. The show obviously has a lot of technical things that must be accomplished. And we very much enjoyed the process of working out with Bill and the choreographers how to make it all work so seamlessly. The show is so much more complex than most anyone looking at it from the audience would realize. The things that have got to happen to keep everyone safe and make everything work — it’s all timed down to the split second. So … we cannot [lose] our concentration on what is happening for one instant to make … things flow smoothly from the beginning of Act One to the end of that act, when… there is a startling and surprising death. I will leave it at that, without spoilers.
On the lack of production history for Something’s Afoot:
Yeah, it’s funny. This show is interesting. … There was a production at Taproot Theater here in Seattle maybe 11 or 12 years ago. And I did see that. It [is] kind of hazy in my memory. So when this show came around, I [went] to YouTube, as I think everyone does nowadays, to see if there [were] other productions … [to] get a sense of what [they’d] be doing. …There’s really only one full professional version on YouTube, of the one that Jean Stapleton did for television back in the ’80s, along with Andy Gibb. I mean, it’s been around for 52 years, I think. So it definitely stood the test of time.
It is done in community theaters. It has not been done very often here, as I said — only once since I came to Seattle in 2005. So but it’s hard to get a sense of how wonderful the show is, because that Jean Stapleton version on YouTube is very grainy and the sound is terrible. And then you have some community theater productions, which you can watch, which are, with all due respect, not particularly well acted or staged. So… I experienced it for the first time fully in rehearsal with these other actors.
On it being a madcap parody:
… It’s all about … keeping the plate spinning, and things are happening all the time… But it is a farce. …At the same time, we’re never winking at the audience. …The stakes are high, as we want to make sure that we find out who the murderer is. … We don’t go to the point of winking at the audience, I don’t think. So it’s an interesting line that you have to tread, between being outlandish as the tone of the show requires, but not making the audience think that we’re not taking it seriously.
But … we had an opening night audience last Friday night… [and] the waves of appreciation and joy and love — and to hear all those people laughing for two hours — was really gratifying for all of us as actors.
On an ensemble show with 11 bawdy numbers and an elaborate set:
There’s no real dancing per se, because I don’t think any of us are [dancers], but the young couple do a little bit of actual, bona fide dancing in their number. But mostly it’s just that very precise staging, from sharp look to sharp look. But I think the effects are pretty great and surprising… I think Deb Trout did an extraordinary job designing the costumes.
And … the set is beautiful. Carey [Wong] is fantastic. I just did Hello, Dolly! earlier this year out at Village that Carey also designed the set for. He did a magnificent job there. And then when I saw his little scale model of our set at our first rehearsal, I thought, “Oh, this is beautiful, beautiful, all those reds!” I think it’s gorgeous to look at, wonderful.
On working with Anne Allgood:
…She came out to Seattle from New York a couple of years before I did in 2005 … but we both had known each other in New York and were delighted to find that we were both “new blood” in the Seattle theater scene. We’ve had the chance to work together a few times, but not as much as we would like to. So it is so great to be reunited in that splendid duet near the end of Act One.
On being on Broadway:
I would go back to New York for a Broadway show — certainly so. I mean, it gets complicated, because they don’t just pass out Broadway roles, and you have to go there to New York to audition and be part of that process. That is far more complicated [to make happen] when you’re 3,000 miles away… But if the theater gods smiled upon me and an offer came along to return to New York for six months or a year on Broadway, I would do so.
Though, honestly, you have to make a Broadway salary to really afford to live in the city. So I don’t think I could go and do [even] an off-Broadway show. It would have to be a Broadway show.
But in the meantime, I’m still committed in a lot of ways, both emotionally and philosophically, to working in the Seattle community as it emerges, like communities all over the United States, from the shutdown, which had very serious effects on the finances of many theaters. Many regional theaters closed, shut their doors permanently as a result, or lost their theater homes. So I’m glad I’m here in this kind of renaissance, this “rising from the ashes” of regional theater, and happy and proud to be part of it.
On the 2001 revival of 42nd Street:
I remember that show. We had opened and we were doing it when 9/11 happened. We closed down along with every other Broadway show [that] went dark and weren’t sure how long it was going to be.
But we were one of the first to come back online, as it were, and we weren’t quite sure how we were going to be perceived. The audiences were so thrilled, having gone through this national tragedy and mourning, to see a show like 42nd Street, which was so filled with joy and escapism. And I’d never felt something like that before… how much joy that particular show can bring to folks.
On 5th Avenue Theatre vs. Broadway:
…When I first came out in 2005 to play Sweeney Todd in David Armstrong’s production …. I didn’t really know anything about Seattle and therefore very little about the 5th Avenue. What surprised me — shocked me really — was that the standards [of the theater] across the board were commensurate with that of Broadway. The amount of care that went into the creation of the costumes and the set, the whole structure of the organization, was very much like Broadway — [things were] taken extremely seriously.
And it was that extraordinarily high standard with which I was familiar that prompted me to want to stick around and come back again and again. And [so] I was bicoastal for a while. So the short answer is that it’s just like working on Broadway, except that when you open a show, [you know] exactly how long it’s going to run — you’re not going to close on opening night, as some Broadway shows do. And you’re also not going to run a year. But you have your three-and-a-half- or four-and-a-half-week run, and you can structure your life around that. But other than the scheduling, the standards are, for me, precisely as I had experienced during the shows I did on Broadway.
On his next role:
I’m not absolutely certain what that’s going to be. I’m taking an extended trip to Egypt next month, and then we’ll see what happens in the spring.
I have written a solo adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. I saw that Eddie Izzard was doing one of his own. I thought, hmm, let me try my own. And I debuted it out in Port Townsend on New Year’s Eve. … So I’m going to try to do some production of that here, probably at Aspire Repertory Theater, which is up here at Northgate. I may try to shop it around to some other places and then maybe just enjoy a nice Seattle summer, which is always a delightful time to be at leisure and then start thinking about the holidays, because I always seem to work during the November-December period with A Christmas Carol, my other solo adaptation. But there’s also a great show at the 5th Avenue coming along in the holidays too. So we’ll see, but I have no positive, specific answer to your question, but thanks for inquiring.
See Fitzpatrick and other A-listers in Something’s Afoot at Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre now through March 24. For more information, including ticket availability and sales, visit https://www.5thavenue.org.