Review: A Killer Night in Studio City Serves Up Camp, Cuisine, and Murder in LA

A Killer Night in Studio City is a delightful evening of song, frivolity, food, and murder. The audience travels through time to the 1950s to solve a devious crime while sipping martinis and slurping up angel hair pasta. The creators do a great job of transporting everyone back with props, costumes, and a sumptuous Hollywood setting, but if you’re looking for a twisty mystery, best to read Agatha Christie when you get home.

The scene is Vitello’s Restaurant in Studio City, a famed spot where Frank Sinatra drank, Liza Minnelli performed, and Robert Blake and his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, dined before her notorious killing outside. Gossip-monger Edith Sinclair (Sarah Wolter) pesters the cocktail-drinking patrons to get the scoop on what they’ve heard about the mysterious death of screen siren Sophia Vance (Brittany Pirozzoli). The (fictional) restaurant owner, Mama Vitello (Brianna Kellum), hosts the funeral, because her son, movie star hunk Johnny Turner (Anthony Carro), had been engaged to Sophia and the family diamond ring is missing.

Diners are taken first to a backroom shrine for Sophia, and then a wake upstairs complete with an Italian buffet—the meatballs are divine—where friends and relatives gather, including TV star Ronnie Bennett (the show’s director Noah Blake) and make-up artist to the famous Arthur Clarkston (Scott Striegel). But who is shedding crocodile tears, and who else will wind up being knifed before dessert?

Written by Kevin Allen Jackson and Kristine Dickson, A Killer Night in Studio City is playful and campy with some goofy laughs, but the creators need to decide if they’re making a spoof or a mystery that makes sense. The production isn’t zany enough to be a parody, and the plot isn’t coherent enough to follow seriously.

An inexplicable killer, clues that lead to dead ends, and other head-scratching nonsense—funny as some of it is—are clear signs that this show needs more work. But the hard-boiled bluster of the dialogue and the jovial cabaret songs pick up some of the slack. It helps that everyone in the cast has a great voice.

Director Blake—the son of the late Robert Blake and stepson of the late Bonny Lee Bakley—explains his rationale for setting the piece at the site where his family made headlines on and after May 4, 2001, on the podcast Strictly Stalking, in the episode “Noah Blake: Murder, Paparazzi & Hollywood.”

But knowing the reasoning behind the location doesn’t resolve the show’s identity crisis. For Blake, if the evening is meant as a spoof, tightening up the dialogue is necessary to keep the energy flowing.

The cast’s performances are contagious, especially the campier one by Kellum and Wolter. Pirozzoli gives a daffiness to her role that fits with the other female actors’ styles. The male actors have a harder time landing the right register. Striegel overdoes the fey stereotype, Carro takes a serious approach that clashes with the other performers’ clowning, and Blake sticks out like a sore thumb. There’s nothing mid-century about his portrayal. He appears to have wandered in from 2026.

Special effects designer Brad Bentz has devised some ornate gadgets that are intriguing, most notably a thrilling ghost effect in a mirror. Writers Jackson and Dickson contribute a book with a secret compartment hiding clues and, most cleverly, a meticulously assembled graphic novel chronicling the central figures, presented as a video that plays on screens to the guests’ side. Those visuals capture the look of MAD Magazine panels with such detail that a collection of those illustrations could be a big seller.

As with any dinner theater, the fare is as important as the production, and Vitello’s is rightfully known for its Italian cuisine. Besides the meatballs and pasta, the buffet includes a Caesar with a tangy dressing and perfectly cooked chicken parmigiana. There were mini cannoli, but the meal left me too full to sample.

The whole experience is charming diversion, giving visitors a walking tour of golden-age Hollywood, complete with a satisfying spread and some amusing high jinks. With some story-line clarification and tightening, it could be something more than just what a tabloid columnist might buzz about.