By Cory-LaNeave Jones

July 25, 2025

In the salt-tinged air of North County’s coastal strip, where surfboards are religion and craft coffee a civic right, you might not expect to find a tight, urbane, dark-hearted musical comedy flourishing in a neighborhood playhouse. And yet, there it is: A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, the 2014 Tony Award winner for Best Musical, making an unexpectedly subversive splash at North Coast Repertory Theater, a venue carved into the affable heart of Solana Beach.

With music and lyrics by Steven Lutvak and book and lyrics by Robert L. Freedman, the piece—a kind of Edwardian bloodbath delivered with a smile—has always demanded a company willing to lean into its contradictions: its British music hall frivolity, its operatic ambition, its sneaky commentary on class, gender, and lineage. Although, sprinkled with a few verses that one would have thought to have left out in our post-George Floyd world (e.g. referring to Indian Children in a quite diminutive manner). What makes this North County production smart isn’t just that, it’s how it allows the show’s patrician bones to flex into something both more local and more emotionally risky. There is blood in the cravat. There is heartbreak in the corset. There is sun-bleached irony in the grave.

The plot—such as it is—centers on the plucky, impoverished Monty Navarro, who learns, shortly after his mother’s death, that he is ninth in line to inherit the “Earldom” of Highhurst from the aristocratic D’Ysquith family. Rather than content himself with a hopeful wait, Monty launches into a clever campaign, as it were, of elimination of his eight relatives who stand between him and his goal of the acquisition of the rights and privileges of all owned rights to the Earl of Highhurst. Think of “Kind Hearts and Coronets” by way of The Importance of Being Earnest, but with bodies dropping faster than manners can be corrected.

Andrew Polec, best known for originating the role of Strat in Bat Out of Hell in the West End and New York, brings a disarmingly contemporary pathos to Monty. Where other performers lean into his cartoonish sociopathy, Polec draws from a deeper well. His Monty is charming, yes, and agile with a patter song, but also restless, lonely, and perhaps even unsure whether he believes in the legitimacy of the system he’s scheming to conquer. With angular limbs and a face that oscillates easily between affable and eerily blank, Polec offers us a man whose murders are oddly logical, even sympathetic. His Monty is a striver—a Gatsby in morning coat—whose crimes feel like a natural byproduct of class exclusion, a dark joke the audience is complicit in telling.

Equally compelling is Lauren Weinberg’s Sibella, Monty’s flame and the musical’s closest thing to a femme fatale. Weinberg finds a wicked sparkle in Sibella’s eyes that plays beautifully against her vocal purity. She knows she’s the smartest person in the room—and perhaps the cruelest—and yet, under her arch seductions lies a fatigue with the performative femininity Victorian England demands. In “Poor Monty,” Weinberg’s phrasing glides atop the orchestration like silk over a blade, giving us not just a mistress, but a tactician, a survivor. She wants Monty’s love—but on her terms, and, much like with Lucy from Peanuts, she wants real estate.

As Miss Barley, Lady Eugenia, and various members of the ensemble, Shinah Hey is the sort of chameleonic performer these kinds of productions live or die by. She’s effervescent when she needs to be, then turns drolly acidic on a dime. In Hey’s hands, Lady Eugenia becomes less a stock grotesque and more a study in inherited repression—like Hyacinth Bucket set to a Gilbert & Sullivan score.

And then there’s the Herculean feat performed by Nicolas Mondigiardo-Cooper as the entire D’Ysquith family—the doomed and increasingly bizarre nobility standing between Monty and his fortuitous forshadowed title. This is the classic “quick-change” track originated by Jefferson Mays on Broadway, and it remains one of the most thrilling marathon challenges for a musical actor. Mondigiardo-Cooper doesn’t mimic Mays; he reinterprets. His Reverend Lord Ezekial is not just doddering but slyly grotesque; his Lady Hyacinth is not only a well-meaning bore but a sublime exercise in vocal absurdism. But it’s in the quieter, more human notes—Lord Asquith’s baffled kindness, for instance—that Mondigiardo-Cooper shows us what makes his performance more than a stunt. These are people, not just punchlines, and their deaths take on a twisted kind of poignancy.

As the instigating Miss Shingle, Jean Kauffman brings a note of gothic restraint to the chaos. She’s like a character out of Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier), stepping lightly into the musical farce with a tone just shy of ghostly. Her scenes with Polec crackle with a morbid intimacy; you can almost believe they’re both veterans of a different play entirely—one darker, maybe, and with fewer laughs. Which makes the comedy that much richer.

The direction here is confident but never overbearing, with choreography that makes nimble use of the theater’s modest stage. Marty Burnett’s brilliant set design leans into a lush, maximalist approach, drawing from Victorian and Grand Guignol color schemes. Elisa Benzoni and Grace Wong provided the costume designs (buttoned, laced, frilled) are sumptuous, occasionally surreal, and beautifully specific in their degradation. You can tell where in the family tree the money’s been lost.

Music is afforded by Jennifer Williams on strings, and Amy Kalal and Katrina Earl on reeds, sound designed by Liam Sullivan and Chris Luessman. Lighting was directed with appropriate skill as directed by Matthew Novotny. And the hair, the hair and the wigs were designed by Peter Herman, very timely and on point.

And perhaps that’s the subtext worth applauding most in this production: that the comedy of class—and murder—isn’t a foreign thing for this audience. North County, for all its beachy charm and laid-back affectation, contains its own versions of the D’Ysquiths. Old money and new ambition tango here daily. Maybe that’s why this satire lands with such bite. The social climbing, the wealth gaps, the genteel violence of manners—it’s all just a little too familiar, especially in such proximity to the Ranch.

What this Gentleman’s Guide gives us is not just a thrilling evening of triple-threat talent and finely tuned mayhem, but a mirror, however distorted. We laugh, we wince to the overture on our way back to the parking lot, unsure whether we’re Monty or one of the D’Ysquiths or that little “Indian” baby. The truth, of course, is that we’re all these people.

And isn’t that the real trick of the theater? To entertain and indict us at the same time.

Run, don’t walk—and watch your back.

“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder”
Now playing at North Coast Repertory Theater at through August 17, 2025.
Tickets available via https://northcoastrep.org/ or at the Box Office at 987 Lomas Santa Fe, Suite D, Solana Beach, CA 92075