Film noir is an easy target for parody. It’s cliches are so ingrained in our subconscious we often don’t realize that many of them came from other parodies of film noir rather than from the actual original movies themselves. According to many critics (and what do critics know?) noir is not even, really, a genre. Rather, they say, it’s a mood or a style. Whether or not it’s a genre, as Justice Potter Stewart famously said about hard-core pornography, I know it when I see it. Dark, usually black and white. Odd camera angles. Lots of shadows (especially of Venetian blinds.) Hard-boiled anti-heroes pulled into dark doings by femme fatales. Thugs and thug police. Okay, so a lot of noir don’t have any of those things. This one does. Shut up.

Theatre of NOTE’s production of Bill Robens’ new play Kill Me, Deadly got it mostly right. Upon entering the theatre, the audience is confronted with a black and white set (well, gray and white – well, blue/gray and white) split into three areas. The first is a typical, run down private dick’s office, the second a living room and the third, the front seat of a car with a rear-projection screen as a back window so that, when Charlie, the hard-boiled PI (played by Dean Lemont) drives the car, we can see where he’s been. In black and white, of course. The details, especially in the office, are spot on. There is even, at one point, a completely unexplained and unacknowledged appearance of that most egregious of all McGuffins, a Maltese Falcon. Delicious.

Even the costumes (by Kimberly Freed) are black and white, with the startling exception of Mona’s dress, which is shockingly red. Mona (Kirsten Vangsness) is, after all, the Lady in Red. We’ll get back to Mona.

The title of this play is a take-off on that of a quintessential noir, a “B” movie directed by Robert Aldrich called Kiss Me Deadly. (It was Cloris Leachman’s first movie. She dies in the first ten minutes, but not before pulling playboy PI Mike Hammer, played by Ralph Meeker, into some very dark dealings indeed.)

The story is fairly typical in its own convoluted way: A rich woman, Lady Clairmont (Kathleen Mary Carthy), has gotten a death threat and hires Charlie to find out who sent it. She has two kids, a sexy daughter, Veronica (the very sexy Megan Bartle), a nerdy, browbeaten son, Clive (the extremely funny Nicholas S. Williams – watch what he can do with a jar of peanut butter) and a large, cursed, red diamond (played, I assume, by a large, cursed piece of red plastic.) Lady Clairmont is dispatched fairly quickly over a bridge. Various thugs and policemen try to thwart Charlie from delving too far. There are many twists, mostly for the sake of twists, and many references, both historical and modern, to the Los Angeles area. Aren’t all good noir films rooted in historical LA?

Lady Clairmont’s British butler, Wilson (played the night I saw it by the understudy, Trevor H. Olsen), is involved with (having an affair with? Hmm…) a mysterious lady in red. That lady in question is a waitress at the joint Charlie hangs out in, and she sidles her way into Charlie’s heart and pulls him more deeply into the mystery. That lady is a marimba player who loves whacking small metal balls with soft little hammers. That lady, played by Kirsten Vangsness, is marvelous, from the delivery of the parody torch song, Rainbow Dreams (written by Bill Newlin and Bill Robens) to the booming, Jessica Rabbit “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way” voice to the sultry seduction to the comic chops. Act two is much funnier, and much tighter than act one, and a great deal of the credit for that goes to Ms. Vangsness, who is featured much more prominently in act two.

Don’t get me wrong, the rest of the cast is uniformly good. Lynn Odell as the secretary who is smarter and a better PI than her boss. Darrett Sanders, Phinneas Kiyomura, Keith Allen, Joe Roche and Wendi West play various bumbling body guards, gentle thugs, mobsters, clueless policemen, gardeners, tramps and hoboes and are all quite good. Mr. Lemont, who is a good actor, and very funny, doesn’t quite physically fit the hard-boiled, morally questionable private dick. His baby face and masculine stance play more as a leading man than the grizzled anti-hero. A minor complaint.

Kill Me, Deadly is directed by Kiff Scholl and written by Bill Robens. The script is mostly quite witty (”… don’t play dumb with me, Mona, it makes your neck look fat.”) It is not the groundbreaking theatre that NOTE is famous for, but they all can’t be “important”, can they? As I mentioned, act one is a little slow, although it definitely picks up the pace and humor in act two. The “who done it” is fairly obvious from the get-go. Part of the parody, I suspect. The set, designed by Davis Campbell, is clever. Besides the car, which is effective, it has a revolving pylon in the middle that serves as the doorway to various houses, offices, establishments, etc.

Theatre of NOTE is located at 1517 N. Cahuenga, Hollywood, CA 90028 (just north of Sunset Blvd.)

Kill Me Deadly opened June 26, 2009 plays Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 pm and Sundays at 2 pm and 7 pm through August 30, 2009.

Ticket prices: $22.00. Seniors and students$18.00.

Reservations online at www.theatreofnote.com or by phone at (323) 856-8611.