Shear Madness OFF-BROADWAY REVIEWS

• NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF Shear Madness

  

  ‘Shear Madness,’ Where Getting a Haircut Is Murder

  Laura Collins-Hughes

  November 11, 2015: Only $30 for a woman’s haircut at a Manhattan salon? That’s what they charge at Shear Madness, a wacky little shop that’s just opened on West 50th Street, though it looks as if it had been there forever. The walls are baby blue, the floor is linoleum, and isn’t that a ficus tree in the corner, over near the exposed brick? What year is this again? You can’t necessarily tell from the banter of the puckish owner, Tony; his gum-chomping stylist, Barbara; or the customers who filter in and out. Sure, there’s a slightly crude Kardashian joke and a mention of Perez Hilton, which at least put us in the past decade or so. Then someone mixes up Cathy Rigby and Eleanor Rigby, and you have to wonder if time has stopped. But the audience at “Shear Madness” on the night I saw it, at New World Stages, loved the Rigby joke, and that’s probably why it’s still in the show, an astonishingly durable interactive murder mystery that’s been running in Boston since Jimmy Carter was in the White House. Which may explain Will Cotton’s set design.

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• HOLLYWOOD REPORTER REVIEW OF Shear Madness

  

  'Shear Madness': Theater Review

  Frank Scheck

  November 11, 2015: The interactive comic whodunnit set in a hair salon finally arrives in NYC after running for decades in such cities as Boston and Washington, D.C. It's hard to imagine why theater-loving tourists still come to New York when we seem so intent on delivering the same product they can get at home. Case in point: Shear Madness, the interactive, comic murder mystery that's become a theatrical institution in Boston, where it's been running 36 years, and Washington, D.C. ( 28 years), as well as in myriad other cities around the globe. Now, a mere 37 years after the show premiered at a dinner theater in Lake George, N.Y., it's arrived off-Broadway for an open-ended run in the hope that similar lightning will strike.

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• HUFFINGTON POST REVIEW OF Shear Madness

  

  First Nighter: Beauty Salon Crime Comedy “Shear Madness” is, as Advertised, Sheer Madness

  David Finkle

  November 14, 2015: Shear Madness has just arrived in Manhattan for the first time after playing for decades(!) in Boston. Curiously, people who hear about it seem to expect not to like it, and, as I arrived, I was among them. How appealing does a seeming farce sound that’s been fruitcaked with broad topical jokes—apparently updated daily—and takes place in a beauty salon? Okay, it doesn’t matter how it sounds, when as it plays at New World Stages on Will Cotton’s evocative set, it turns out to be consistently entertaining. We’re in the Shear Madness salon. Even before the action begins, one stylist at work is Tony Whitcomb (Jordan Ahnquist). He’s a gay blade—or barber with blades, who isn’t Sweeney Todd. The other is Barbara DeMarco (Kate Middleton, but not the English one). She’s gussied up in leopard top and frayed denim miniskirt. (Rodney Harper is the costumer).

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