Four Letter Word Theatre’s original murder mystery musical comedy The Scarlet Sun is a fast, frenetic and hilarious production that showcases the talent of the University of Melbourne’s student performers with its impressive stagecraft and exciting musical storytelling. Their closing night performance was an event where everything fit together perfectly.

The plot is a pastiche of murder mystery comedy films like Knives Out and Clue. A violent murder occurs at the declining French hotel The Scarlet Sun. The guests and staff all have secret schemes and ulterior motives. It’s up to quarrelling detectives Jasper Clarke and Alexandra Knight to get to the bottom of this whodunnit. There are abundant double crosses and big reveals you’d expect from this story, communicated by characters often acting parallel scenes on-stage. 

The show’s fast and irreverent direction could make this level of complexity hard for theatre-goers to follow. Fortunately, the show’s large ensemble cast was up to the challenge of making sure each character moment could be followed. Every character is unique and easy to identify. Every one of them had colour coordinated costumes provided by costume designer Bella Russell that instantly clue audiences into characters’ broad archetypes. The actors brought distinctive styles of vocal and physical acting so the audience is never confused when multiple characters are acting parallel to one another. A comedic highlight of the performance are Zhi Syuen Yee and Emily Napolitano as cranky socialite Florence Gold and her cynical secretary Rose. 

The songs, written by Ethan Francis D’Amour and Alec Stadler, really helped the murder mystery move along at an engaging pace. Stadler had composed an array of hummable melodies and used diverse period appropriate genres. Songs range from jazz to showtunes to disco. Francis-D’Amour’s lyrics are full of complex rhymes and densely packed with plot developments and character details in each verse. 'The Blame Game' and Act One closer 'Out to Kill' are musical storytelling triumphs, with their fast pace and complex but flowing rhymes successfully recapping what audiences know about the suspects while deftly revealing new details about the case.

Songs that slow down and spend time with just one character are also highlighted. Darcy Vissenjoux’s bellboy with a secret gets an emotional ballad about putting himself on the line for his lover in the form of 'Change of Heart'. Bronte Lemaire’s Miss Amber (another comedic highlight) gets to step up as a detective in her own right in the disco-inspired 'How Do You?' Giving each character time for development and understandable motivations while keeping the story moving at a brisk pace is a challenge. Doubly so in song form. The songs enhancing audience engagement in the mystery, rather than being a distraction, demonstrates an exceptional command of musical theatre storytelling.

Overall, The Scarlet Sun is a fun show that has a promising future for the actors, writers and crew of the Four Letter Word theatre company. It wears its influences on its sleeve while giving us something new with its clever songs and layered storytelling. I hope to see other people get a chance to figure out who did the deed at The Scarlet Sun.

The Scarlet Sun ran at Union Theatre from 11-14 October.