The Midnight Snack. Drayton Arms Theatre.

True Crime podcasts are quite the rage nowadays. BBC Sounds carries over 50 of them with dozens more on Apple, Google, and Spotify. Almost as ubiquitous are spoofs of the genre, with TVs hugely popular Only Murders in the Building the cream of the crop. Something about the podcasts’ solemn tone, hyperbolic delivery, and over-dramatic structure seems to invite parody. Alas, Other Mysteries’ theatre company’s jointly penned comedy The Midnight Snack, based on their own series of lockdown podcasts, visibly struggles to stretch the satire into an hour of watchable humour.

Harry Veritas (Jonah Walsh) spends his afternoons making podcasts in the basement of mum Myrtle’s small-town American home. A kind of wannabe Dashiell Hammett detective hero, he already has 15 paying subscribers. That is 15 more than his productions merit. The problem is there is simply not enough criminality in his town to write about. That changes when food critic Stanley Indexer, chief judge in the local ‘Blossom To Bloom’ cherry-pie competition is found brutally slain outside the local food truck. Spying an opportunity to find himself a bigger audience, Harry sets about solving the bloody stabbing.

Carolyn Hartvigsen and Mackenzie Larsen play the half-dozen murder suspects, plus a couple of other ephemeral characters, with only an energetically revolving series of wigs, hats, and extravagant accents as support. Is the murderer the mysterious, beautiful, and seductive psychotherapist Josie? Or perhaps the fried-chicken-shop king with a suspiciously poor short-term memory? Or could it be local TV chef and true-blue Brit, Isla, whose antagonism towards the slain food-critic masks deeper passions? Crime suspects rarely come quite as immersed in stock as this crew.

The point of The Midnight Snack is not really to solve the crime although the show just about gets there in the end. It is more about the slapstick potential of all these wacky characters bumping into and off each other. Sadly, much of the humour that emerges from their various encounters barely moves beyond the fringe level. Harry’s Mum’s curly pink wig and deep south accent have a limited lifespan as comic devices; they pall roughly 15 minutes in. Having a possibly murderous chicken chef talk about “fowl play” and “nuggets of information” invites a groan rather than a chuckle. An overlong skit on competitive bakers fizzles out without much sign of a giggle.

It is not that performing trio do not work hard here. Hartvigsen and Larsen are visibly sweating from so many wig-changes by the end of the show. But comedy characters, even cod ones, have to go somewhere to keep an audience engaged. These suspects barely fill 60 minutes.

Writer: Other Mysteries based on the original podcasts

Director: Candice MacAllister