A Tireless Actress, Back at the Scene of the ‘Crime’

Before the pandemic, Catherine Russell had missed only four performances of an Off Broadway perennial since 1987. She was onstage for its reopening.

On Sunday, before a small, masked, spaced-apart audience at the Theater Center, the most persistent show in New York made a return after what might be described as — in the scheme of things — a brief intermission. Warren Manzi’s “Perfect Crime” opened on April 14, 1987, and stubbornly stayed put. The unflashy murder mystery has remained more or less the same as everything changed around it. It took an international pandemic to shut the show down for 13 months. Until then, Catherine Russell, now 65, had missed only four performances in the lead role of a possibly murderous psychiatrist. She owns and runs the building, which is also the venue for “The Office: A Musical Parody.” That show is running again, too; Russell hands out tickets at its box office.