A mystery for the stage has become a summer tradition at Park Square Theatre.
But the COVID-19 shutdown means the downtown St. Paul theater will be without sleuth, clues and whodunit this year.
Or will it …
It doesn’t take a crackerjack detective to figure out the theater’s scheduled production of “Holmes and Watson” had to be postponed. But the mystery game is still afoot!
It will simply have a digital footprint.
Park Square launches “Riddle Puzzle Plot” on July 24. The online interactive mystery will be serialized and run over four weeks on Zoom, with clues revealed as the story unfolds. Playwright Jeffrey Hatcher (who also wrote the “Holmes and Watson” that was supposed to be on stage now) is creating “Riddle Puzzle Plot.”
That’s right. Creating. “I’ve barely got a toe into it,” Hatcher said in an early July phone interview. “Whatever way I can, I’ll include the audience in terms of participation.”
Here’s the plot: A group of actors usually gets together for a scavenger hunt, but because of the pandemic, this year “instead of roaming around town,” they have to do a virtual hunt. There are clues and riddles during their Zoom chat “and then something happens,” Hatcher says.
And it could happen again. …
Prolific playwright Hatcher – whose credits include Broadway, off-Broadway and local productions, including History Theatre’s popular “Glensheen” (also postponed this summer) – knows his Holmes. He has written “Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Suicide Club” and “Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders.” And he was the screenwriter for the 2015 movie “Mr. Holmes.”
Hatcher says the Zoom production is sort of a combination of stage and screen, but feels closest to the early days of television. Though it will be recorded, “it should have that weird, live quality where things can go wrong and do go wrong,” Hatcher says. “It should feel like it’s live.”
The square of a Zoom box is each costumed actor’s set. The characters are archetypes of murder mysteries — The Host, The Gimlet-Eyed Cynic, The Usual Suspect, The Ingenue, The Femme Fatale, The Gigolo, The Hard-Boiled Dame with a Heart of Gold.
One $30 ticket covers all four episodes. Viewers could wait and binge them all at once, but Hatcher advises watching each and using the time in between to puzzle out the clues. “It best to watch at the pace it was designed to be seen,” Hatcher says.
“Riddle Puzzle Plot” will be pre-recorded, but will have live introductions and audience interactions on Fridays and Saturdays, said Michael-jon Pease, executive director of Park Square Theatre.
The live interaction on Friday and Saturday will sort the audience at random into breakout rooms for smaller group interactions with separate characters, Pease says. “And a couple of audience members who participate will be selected at random to be featured at the top of the next episode as part of the pre-show introduction.”
Audiences watching on their own after the weekly episode will see a recording of the Friday show, including the audience interaction.
Classic mystery novels were often serialized in magazines and newspapers, Pease says. And fans of “Masterpiece Mystery” on PBS watch the story unfold week by week.
Pease says the theater’s core audience is hungry for live theater and while online can’t replace that, it gives theaters a challenge: “What is this new medium and how can we maximize it?”
In May, Park Square released a Zoom-created production of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which it stages for school groups during the season. The production received 476,000 impressions – including 16,000 in Israel and even a few in Tobago, Pease says.“This is what we have and this is what we need right now,” Pease says. The theater has also had a monthly residency with “The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society” which presents old radio shows and transitioned to online.
Pease says some “Old Radio” viewers are even dressing in costumes to be part of the shows on Zoom.
A history with mystery
Pease says Park Square produced its first mystery in its first season (“Dial M For Murder,” 1975), but didn’t produce one again until 1993 with Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap.”
Park Square rented the Historic Hamm Building Theatre (now its current Proscenium stage) for that summer to test out the location and the summer market. “The show was a hit and was extended, breaking all previous Park Square box office records and it held the record until 1996.”
When Park Square returned to the mystery genre in 2008 with “Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure” by Steven Dietz, the show set a new record. And the summer mystery was set.
Except for 2012, when Park Square produced the comedy “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” by Neil Simon, a mystery (usually in the summer) has been part of each of the past 11 seasons, Pease says.
The mystery genre has also inspired five commissions by Park Square: “The Red Box” and “Might As Well Be Dead” – both Nero Wolfe adaptations by Joseph Goodrich; “Sherlock Holmes and The Ice Palace Murders” by Hatcher adapted from Larry Millett’s novel about Sherlock in Minnesota; a new adaptation of Agatha Christie’s “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” (coming by 2022) and now “Riddle Puzzle Plot.”
“So far, nearly 80,000 people have seen mysteries at Park Square and they have definitely become our answer to (the Guthrie Theater’s popular annual staging of) ‘A Christmas Carol’ – a fun, intergenerational gathering for families and mystery fans,” Pease says.
He admits he’s become “so infected” by the mysteries at Park Square that when he got a new car with a back-up camera, he wondered, “How would this play in a murder mystery?”
“Every mystery-watcher is an armchair sleuth,” Pease says.
Hatcher says people have been watching a lot of crime and murder mysteries on TV while the pandemic has kept them at home. When it comes to storytelling, “Murder is always fun.”
‘Riddle Puzzle Plot’ details
- When: Weekly episodes July 24-Aug. 14; 7:30 p.m.; Friday series July 24, 31, Aug. 7 and 14; Saturday series July 25, Aug 1, 8 and 15. Streaming online through Aug. 16.
- Tickets: $30 for all four episodes; parksquaretheatre.org
- Featuring: Aimee K. Bryant, Alessandra Bongiardina, Pearce Bunting, Shanan Custer, Rodolfo Nieto, E.J. Subkoviak, Sun Mee Chomet
- Directed by: Warren C. Bowles
"four" - Google News
July 18, 2020 at 11:32PM
https://ift.tt/30peyhN
Park Square whodunit has clues and characters, online in four installments - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press
"four" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2ZSDCx7
https://ift.tt/3fdGID3
No comments:
Post a Comment