Dying is easy, comedy is hard — and musical comedy is murder. At the least, judging from “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder,” it’s a killer workout: Since starting previews in October, stars Jefferson Mays and Bryce Pinkham have lost a combined 25 pounds.
Add the extra Tony campaign song-and-dance and you see why Mays, making a pie chart of his time off, gave three-quarters of it to “I lie in a coma in my oxygen tent.”
Their exertions have paid off. “Gentleman” netted 10 Tony nominations, one for Pinkham as Monty, a distant heir to a British fortune, and another for Mays, who plays the eight relatives Monty neatly offs as he climbs the ladder to his title. “It would be much easier to do this play if we didn’t like each other,” quips Mays, 49. “I like to think Bryce has a twinge of conscience every time he dispatches me.”
“Only because I know you’ll come back!” replies Pinkham, 31.
At lunch (eaten with the fervor of men who haven’t dined in days) they joke as if they’ve been together forever. In fact, Pinkham was a college student when he saw Mays play nearly 40 characters in “I Am My Own Wife.”
But none of those characters had to sing and dance. So hard do they work in “Gentleman” that their favorite moment is when their female costars sing, and they’re lying silent on the stage.
And here they are, up for the same Tony award. What are their hopes?
“I’m thinking of changing my name to Neil Patrick Harris to make it harder,” Mays jokes. “But my fantasy is that it will be a tie, and Bryce and I will both win.”
Pinkham agrees. “It’s been quite a ride,” he says. For now, they say, they’d be happy just for a nap.