• By GEORGE MORRIS
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Nov 12, 2009 - Page: 1D

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Staging a play that the public knows as a beloved old movie is a risk-reward proposition. The popularity of the movie can sell tickets, but it sets a high standard to live up to.

This time for Baton Rouge Little Theater, no worries. “Arsenic and Old Lace” by Joseph Kesselring is all about the “old lace” — and Stephanie Levert and Kathy Sevin deliver.

Playing two hospitable old spinsters who just happen to be serial killers, Levert and Sevin are the stars around whom the story revolves. That story is familiar enough that on the opening Saturday night, many in the audience were chuckling at lines whose double meaning could only be known to those aware of the plot.

Abby Brewster (Levert) and Martha Brewster (Sevin) are aging sisters who live in Brooklyn with their addled nephew, Teddy (Kurt Hauschild), who thinks he is Teddy Roosevelt. Except for his occasional late-night trumpet blasts, he’s harmless, though it wouldn’t be wise to be on the stairs when he’s ascending; Teddy always uses that opportunity to re-enact Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill.

The play opens happily enough. Another nephew, Mortimer (Travis Williams), a theater critic, drops by on the way to a play he is scheduled to review and proposes to his girlfriend, Elaine Harper (Ashley Lopez), who accepts. It has the makings of a great night until he happens to open a window seat in his aunt’s dining room and discover a dead man inside.

His aunts, it turns out, occasionally rent out rooms, and one day an elderly boarder died of natural causes. He had no family, and seemed so peaceful and content in death that they decided to “help” other lonely old men by lacing their homemade elderberry wine with poison. They disposed of the men in the basement where Teddy, in his mind digging the Panama Canal, would bury them, thinking they’d died of yellow fever. The latest victim was put in the window seat until his grave could be dug.

This sufficiently complicates Mortimer’s life, but there is more. His other brother, Jonathan (Jeffrey Johnson), shows up. Jonathan, himself a murderer, is joined by Dr. Einstein (Ronald Coats), a plastic surgeon who helps Jonathan stay a step ahead of the law. This reunion brings with it all sorts of danger and hilarity.

All of the cast is at least adequate to the occasion. Williams has the biggest shoes to fill — Cary Grant played Mortimer in the screen version — and handles things well after discovering his aunts’ secret. Johnson is quite menacing as Jonathan, and Coats brings a lot of comedy to his role.

But Levert, especially, is a constant delight throughout the play, so affable and sweet and blithely unaware that what she is doing is the least bit wrong. The play, just short of 2‰ hours, including a 15-minute intermission, moves along and keeps the audience’s attention with continual laughter.

The set design is excellent and seems almost identical to our memories of the movie. One quibble: Phil Blanchard, Weston Twardowski and Matt Story act sufficiently well, but their grooming — longish hair and beard — makes them look nothing like how we picture 1930s New York City policemen.