Two of my favorite plays in the 1990s were the clever comedy Over the River and Through the Woods and the sketch musical I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change. Both came from the pen of Joe DiPietro, a very funny writer. His 2000 play The Art of Murder takes place in the world of art. It won an Edgar Allen Poe Award that year for an outstanding work of mystery. The show is full of eccentric characters — the egotistical artist, his beleaguered wife, his savvy art dealer — and DiPietro has used his flair for the outrageous to create a world in which greed, vengeance and personal recognition are free to play with the sanity and the lives of everyone involved. The New York Times said the play was as much about “the merchandising and the counterfeiting of art as the plotting and the counterplotting of murder,” which makes it a perfect tale for the Showboat Majestic, where good storytelling is what’s expected by longtime patrons. Through Aug. 28.
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