What do a Vietnam veterans’ group, an eighth-grader and a Georgetown couple with frequent out-of-town visitors have in common?
Chances are, they’ve seen “Shear Madness,” the interactive murder mystery set in a hair salon that has run for the past 20 years at the Kennedy Center.
Associate Artistic Director Bob Lohrmann said it’s almost impossible at this point for him to run into someone on the street who hasn’t seen the production.
Despite this, the show isn’t playing to empty audiences, said associate producer Robert Warren.
“Other than three months after Sept. 11, you could calculate our attendance week by week almost down to the seat,” Warren said. The show has brought in about $3 million in ticket sales annually for the past eight years.
Marketing for the show has been steady, whether it be radio buys or Kennedy Center mailings, but a great deal of the audience is return customers, namely student tour groups from all over the country that show up year after year.
The show is so popular that the theater schedules two performances a day during the spring season.
Lohrmann, who has been with the D.C. show for 16 years as a performer, writer and director, joked that the “great paycheck” keeps him coming back, but thinks the show’s spontaneity is the best part of it.
The murder mystery has five endings, the cast changes at least four times a year, and the show gets rewritten every day to stay fresh; right now, it pokes fun at Michael Vick, Larry Craig and Fred Thompson.
“Once you’ve been in ‘Shear Madness’ for awhile, you start evaluating everything that happens in the world based on whether you can make a joke about it,” Lohrmann said.
The show is always set the same day as the performance, meaning if it’s raining outside, actors will enter with their hair wet, or run outside during the winter to pack their boots with snow before coming onstage.
Still, some things about “Shear Madness” don’t change; the intimate set in the Kennedy Center’s Theater Lab has stayed the same, down to a now-patented wallpaper design. Though the show can’t go on forever, Warren doesn’t see its D.C. run ending anytime soon.
“As long as it keeps selling and appealing to so many groups, it’s pretty safe,” he said.
“Shear Madness” by the numbers
Years running at the Kennedy Center: 20
Cities housing permanent productions: Boston, D.C., Chicago
Translated into: 11 languages
Seen by: 8.2 million people worldwide, 2.4 million and counting in D.C.
Employed: More than 130 equity actors
Worldwide gross: More than $160 million
Marriage proposals during the show by audience members: Over 100
Casualties: 58 blow dryers, nine barber chairs, 127 bottles of stage blood, 233 hairbrushes, more than 8,700 cans of shaving cream
