Gunshots ring out. A man has reportedly been murdered. Now the police come knocking, demanding to speak to the suspect, his wife. A petite woman with platinum blonde curls, she stomps around her living room in stilettos, emphatically protesting her innocence. But did she do it?
That’s the question I’m trying to figure out on a Saturday afternoon in a small off-Broadway theatre as I watch performance number 15,362 of Perfect Crime, the longest-running play in New York City’s history.
The murder-mystery premiered 39 years ago and, for almost every performance since, Catherine Russell has played the lead role of Margaret Brent, a wealthy psychiatrist accused of murdering her husband.
It’s a feat that has earned Russell a place in Guinness World Records for the actress with the most theatre performances in the same role (8820 on December 1, 2008). Now 70, she still performs eight shows a week and has missed just four performances in almost four decades, when her siblings were married out of town.
On her own wedding day, in 2017, the show went on. “My husband and I got married at City Hall, and we went to the Palm [restaurant in Manhattan] for lunch, and then he went home and took a nap, and I came to work,” she says.
The first time the curtain went up on Perfect Crime there was no need to tell the audience to turn off their mobile phones. Back then, hardly anyone owned one. It was 1987. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, and Donald Trump was a real estate mogul telling interviewers he had no intention of running for president.
The play was originally scheduled for 16 performances. “Nobody thought it would run for years and years,” says Russell, who was 31 when the show opened. Since then, the crime genre has morphed into a seemingly endless array of incarnations, from television series such as CSI to thriller fiction, documentaries and true-crime podcasts. But Perfect Crime has an old-school, whodunnit feel.
Russell says that the show’s playwright, Warren Manzi, was heavily influenced by Agatha Christie, the English writer known as the “Queen of Crime” who wrote The Mousetrap, the world’s longest-running play (after premiering in 1952, it clocked up 30,000 performances in London’s West End in March 2025).
“People have always been obsessed with crime,” Russell says, when I ask about the secret to the show’s longevity. “People love mysteries … People love figuring things out. And Perfect Crime follows that model.”
Growing up in Connecticut, the daughter of a lawyer father and homemaker mother, Russell always wanted to be an actress. Onstage, she’s a fast-talking, energetic pocket rocket. Offstage, her life seems to follow a similarly frenetic pace.
Every day, she’s at The Theater Center on 50th Street, where the play is performed on the fourth floor. Most nights, she locks up at about 11.30pm, before heading home to her nearby apartment.
In addition to performing, she’s also the general manager of the building, where three other shows are staged. The role can see Russell switch from selling tickets in the box office to fixing the air-conditioning and plumbing. She also teaches English and theatre studies to university students four mornings a week, and runs an acting class on the set on weekends. After her husband died in 2019, she took over managing his pizza shop.
She doesn’t take holidays, and says she never grows bored playing the lead role or coming to the theatre. “I just like being in a theatre,” she says, explaining that she loves watching others on stage as much as performing herself. “It’s magical … I love sitting in a room with people, hearing a story told. I like being the storyteller and I like hearing the story equally … It’s something communal.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly brought the curtain down on New York’s entertainment industry in March 2020, it didn’t stop Russell from going to her beloved theatre every day. She spent the time doing repair jobs, and when the city began allowing gyms and restaurants to open, she launched into action mode. Joining forces with several other small venues, she helped organise a class action seeking permission to reopen.
Several days before their scheduled court hearing, the local government decided that small theatre venues could open with limited capacity. After the theatre had been closed for 13 months, Russell opened the doors to the public and returned to the stage. “I hadn’t forgotten my lines,” she says.
‘For all the people who have criticised the play or made fun of the play, we’re still here.’
Catherine Russell
Russell’s energy levels show no signs of flagging. She’s now trying to raise $US10 million ($14.3 million) to renovate another nearby building into a complex of five small theatres ($US4 million is already banked). “I’m a big believer in ‘just keep going’. Don’t stop,” she says.
Her secret to keeping up this hectic pace? “Marine” push-ups – 180 of them – and 80 sit-ups a day. “You need to keep up your strength and stamina,” she says. When I ask her to describe a “Marine” push-up, she jumps down to the floor and knocks out half a dozen of them on her toes.
Russell is the only original cast member still appearing in Perfect Crime. Over the years, she and the producers tweaked the script to better reflect contemporary settings. The characters now talk to “Alexa”, the AI assistant, which didn’t exist when the show opened, and the husband’s wealth has increased from $US10 million to $US900 million.
Rewrites of the script have seen the show’s duration cut from the original three hours down to one hour and 45 minutes. “That’s also a reflection of the times,” says Russell. “People have a shorter attention span these days.”
The cast may not be performing to sold-out venues, but the play has some intensely loyal devotees. Russell puts me in touch with Jason VanOra, a 46-year-old psychology professor who estimates he’s seen the show somewhere between 50 and 100 times.
The first time he watched the play, in 2014, he says, “I knew I hadn’t picked up all the clues and I hadn’t got it by the end.” He returned to figure out the mystery, then kept coming back because, he says, “I was really intrigued: how does [Russell] do it night after night and keep it fresh? This idea of someone having been doing the same show, having found some stability in such an unstable field, I think that’s really intriguing,” he says.
On the afternoon I go to see Perfect Crime, there are about three dozen people in the 200-seat theatre, an intimate space where the front-row seats are just a metre or so from the stage. By the time the lights come on, I’m still struggling to figure out whodunnit. Heading into the foyer, I pick up a copy of the two-page plot explainer that reveals the answer.
I wasn’t the only one in need of the cheat sheet. “It was kind of complicated,” says 18-year-old Anusha Azad, one of Russell’s English students who came to see the show with two friends. “It’s a lot to process.”
An older woman from North Carolina, who’d come to New York for a weekend of stage shows, was also still churning over the plot. “I’m still working on it; it happens very fast,” she says. “There’s a part of me that wonders because they’ve done it so many times … I felt like it was rushed.”
But, she added, “It’s really nuanced. I can see why it’s been running for so long. I’ve never seen a murder-mystery unfold in that way. It would be really great to come back.”
The play has had its share of critics over the years, from theatre reviewers to the man who recognised Russell at her pizza shop and began yelling that it was “the worst play in the entire world”.
But the criticism seems to easily wash off this stage veteran. “Some people hate it, some people love it,” Russell says. “It’s complicated … you have to have a certain mindset. You have to like figuring out mysteries or like something psychological. If you like puzzles, the play appeals to you.”
It may not have the dramatic stunts, high-tech lighting and dazzling stagecraft of a big-budget Broadway spectacular, but Perfect Crime has outlasted its competitors in a city with an abundance of offerings vying for -people’s attention.
“I’m enormously proud of the fact that for all the people who have criticised the play or made fun of the play, we’re still here,” says Russell. “It’s kind of like the little engine that could.”
You get the sense Russell will be the one to determine when she takes her final bow.
Get the best of Good Weekend delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. Sign up for our newsletter.
