We live in a world ruled by pop princesses and pancake houses, where video games have replaced books and writers no longer need grammar. But look deeper, and it’s easy to see that our sometimes witless world remains an inquisitive and clever place. In short essays, our writers probe those signs of intelligent life.
MURDER MYSTERIES
One man’s dumb is another man’s masterpiece theater.
Interactive murder-mystery theater can be dumb as a box of arsenic. Listen to these premises: Murder . . . at a family engagement party! Murder . . . in Dead Man’s Gulch! Murder . . . at an awards ceremony for TV ad pitchmen!
Make all the fun you want, but Matthew Osmun submits that murder mystery “is the new genre of farce and parody in the American theater.”
The murder mystery may be easily mocked, but it’s the largest growth area in local theater by far. Audiences are eating (and hamming) it up in shows staged at historic Denver homes like the Lumber Baron Inn, at restaurants and hotels like the Embassy Suites, at mountain getaway guest houses like the Baldpate Inn in Estes Park and the Gold Hill Inn above Boulder.
The Adams Mystery Playhouse, the longest-running mystery company in Denver, brought in about 14,000 people last year and has sold 35,000 tickets since 2007.
Born out of melodrama, interactive murder mysteries are the kind of live theater that people actually want to go to. Because they are fun.
“It’s deliberately silly, campy and over-the-top,” said Osmun, whose MO Productions is now staging “As Slain on TV” at the Broker and Cork House restaurants. “We’re basically walking cartoon characters.
“But our whole purpose is to take people’s minds off their worries and troubles — and get rowdy and raunchy.”
And it is harder, as they say, to make people laugh than cry.
“It is an art,” Osmun said. “What we do has more timing and physicality to it than people give it credit for.”
Adams’ “mystery maven,” Marne Wills-Cuellar, who founded her Death for Dinner company in 1983, said “much of the art comes from the quality of the performers,” who draw on many performance styles including slapstick and improv comedy.
“There is also an art to writing interesting and believable stories,” she said. “This is not something that can be thrown together in a short period of time, with no script-writing background,” she said.
Murder mystery theater in Colorado
Here’s a list of mystery dinner-theater productions in Colorado:
ADAMS MYSTERY PLAYHOUSE
Presented by Marne Interactive Productions, 2406 Federal Blvd., Denver, 80211, 303-455-1848 or
Through April 23, 2011: “Who Wants to Murder a Millionaire?”
April 28-June 25, 2011: “Murder in Dead Man’s Gulch”
BALDPATE MYSTERY THEATRE
Baldpate Inn, 4900 South Highway 7, Estes Park, 970-586-6151 or
July 8-16, 2011: “Seven Keys to Baldpate”
July 29-Aug. 6, 2011: “Arsenic and Old Lace”
THE DINNER DETECTIVE
Embassy Suites Hotel, 7525 East Hampden Avenue, Denver, and also at the Embassy Suites Hotel, 7290 Commerce Center Drive, Colorado Springs, 888-575-3884
Ongoing: “The Murder Mystery Dinner Show” (Saturdays only)
MO PRODUCTIONS MURDER MYSTERY THEATRE
At the Cork House, 4900 E. Colfax Ave., Denver, 303-355-4488, or
Also at the Broker Restaurant, 821 17th St. Denver, 303-292-5065, or
April 2, 2011: “Limited Engagement: A Musical Murder Mystery” (at the Cork House)
April 3, 2011: “Limited Engagement: A Musical Murder Mystery” (at the Broker)
April 16, 2011: “As Slain on TV” (at the Cork House)
April 17, 2011: “As Slain on TV” (at the Broker Restaurant)
TIL DEATH DO US PARTY
Gold Hill Inn, 401 Main Street, Gold Hill, Boulder, 303-443-6461 or
Resumes April 29.
See ‘related,’ above right, for 8 other signs of intelligent life in The Age of Stupid.
