I've been meaning to write about my weekend ever since, well, since the weekend, and the fact that it pretty much IS the weekend again should be an indicator of just how busy I've been, and how little time I've had to sit down and write about how entertaining it can be to eat jambalaya and watch someone die.
I got invited to the Eddie May Murder Mysteries 25th Anniversary party last Friday. Did you know there was an ongoing murder mystery dinner theatre in Ottawa, much less that it had been running for 25 years? I had been aware of the former... but not the latter. I guess I'd assumed that Eddie May had started up fairly recently, along with a lot of the other fun performances that you can find around town.
But here it is and here it's been, and I'm really glad that I've finally had a chance to go and see it. I brought a mystery-loving friend along to see if she could figure it out, since my mystery experience is limited to The Murders in the Rue Morgue and a few "How to Host a Murder" games when I was a teenager. (Our table were dead wrong about the murderer, incidentally, but not so wrong that we gained any public ridicule for it.)
It's dinner theatre. No, you're not looking for nuanced acting, this is broad caricature. The actors are working throughout a room, to an audience full of people who are busy eating and drinking and not thinking about this as theatre. Their job is to get the audience to have fun - and that means bringing them into the action, to a greater or lesser degree depending on how comfortable they are with it. Giving them the licence to interact with the room (because to figure it out you do need to go talk to the characters, and pick up the evidence and poke at it - and you need to feel like that's okay.)
It's also really hard to resist mobsters in brightly coloured suits, musical numbers, and the opportunity to match your heckling wits with the cast ... with the number of theatre people that were in the audience the night I was there, the banter was particularly good. By the time we got to the 'unveiling the evidence' scene at the end, a lot of the audience were more than willing to call out their guesses and theories, and spar with "Seamus." (Does it help that dinner comes with wine? Indubitably.)
Yeah, it's good silly fun. People get shot, and then they serve you your dinner, and then the suspects make the rounds and talk to your table and joke about the fact that you're munching away when someone just got shot. There's a hilariously protracted death scene complete with a lot of spouting blood (don't wear your favorite silk shirt if you're going to be sitting in the middle aisles.) There are musical interludes, and treachery enough to keep anyone gleeful. You get to speculate away, question the actors, and play along. You can poke over the physical evidence and try to grill the gangsters - in fact, it's best if you do. You'll miss out if you just go to eat dinner, sit back and watch... get in and play. There should be more opportunities like this for everyone to just play.
