Getting Away with Murder (play)
| Getting Away with Murder: A Comedy Thriller |
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| Written by |
Stephen Sondheim George Furth |
| Characters | Martin Chisholm Dossie Lustig Gregory Reed Pamela Prideaux |
| Date premiered | March 17, 1996 |
| Place premiered | Broadhurst Theatre |
| Original language | English |
| Genre | Whodunit, Comedy, Thriller |
| Setting | Suite on the top floor of an old Upper West Side apartment building; the present, October 5 |
Getting Away with Murder is a play written by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, which ran for 17 performances on Broadway in 1996.
The action centers on seven well-to-do patients of an eminent psychiatrist meeting for their weekly group therapy session. During a fierce Manhattan thunderstorm, the patients arrive and soon discover that their doctor, Dr. Conrad Bering, has been murdered. Wanting to avoid bad publicity, "the patients conduct their own investigation amid power blackouts, sightings of phantom figures on the terrace outside, and enigmatic messages on the doctor's answering machine." Each of the characters is named based on the seven deadly sins, for example Dossie Lustig and Pamela Prideaux. The building is vacant except for Dr. Bering, because it is going to be renovated.
In an interview with Anthony Shaffer, Sondheim discussed the background of the play (as well as many other areas of interest): "In Getting Away With Murder, I started from what I wanted for a first-act curtain. It's hard to talk about it without giving something away. But there is a mystery, there is a solution and there is in the truest sense of the word a detective. It's just that it doesn't manifest itself in the usual way.... I had this plot idea, which I mentioned to George, because I thought it should be sharp and funny and very New York... because the plotting gets fairly complex in the second act, he [Furth] bogged down. So I wrote that act and then we started to edit each other's stuff. The collaboration became blended as we went over each other's work. I suspect in two years we won't know who wrote which lines. We wrote it for fun. I had never intended or expected that it would get on."
The play premiered on Broadway in previews at the Broadhurst Theatre on February 20, 1996. After 29 previews the show opened on March 17 and closed on March 31 after 17 performances. The cast featured John Rubinstein, Terrence Mann, Christine Ebersole, Jodi Long, Herb Foster (Dr. Conrad Bering), Frankie Faison, Mia Farrow (voice), George Furth (voice), Michelle Hurd and Josh Mostel.
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