By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Inspector Stanley Parker of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has just shared a drink at the Craggy Rock Saloon with his colleague, Sheriff Hap Hazard, when shots ring out, and — with a considerable flourish — the local lawman falls dead.
“That shot came from outside this room. Anyone not in the room when the crime occurred is a suspect,” announces the Mountie. “Now, as the highest ranking official currently breathing, I must stay and conduct an investigation.” No one in the room is shocked by the killing — after all, it’s what they’ve been waiting for.
A few minutes later, Act One of the none-too-subtly named “Murder At Craggy Rock” ends, but no curtain comes down. Instead, the audience is invited to have dinner with the curious collection of characters that have been dancing around them for the last half-hour.
Oddly, Inspector Stanley Cramer has been at the scenes of a lot of Seattle area murders this past year, mainly because Marcus Bingham, the author of Murder At Craggy Rock, www.Murder.com, and Two-by-Four-by Death, among others, happens to own a fairly good RCMP costume. In addition to being the chief playwright and star of the show, Bingham is the producer/director and creative — or mad — “genius” behind Murder Mysteries Northwest. Since July 2002, the mystery theater has been giving the Murder Mystery Dinner Train a run for its money.
Actually, Bingham says, the two productions are different enough that they really are not in competition. Besides, he adds, there appears to be more than enough work for both companies. While the dinner train goes for a modicum of realism in their productions, Northwest Murder Mysteries are played with a slapstick air of frivolity, in other words, strictly for laughs.
“They’re doing it very well on the Mystery Train. What they do is a little different than what we do but it’s still the same ticket,” says Bingham.
What they are both doing is what he calls “interactive murder mystery dinner theater — a parody of the detective genre where the action takes place in and amongst the audience.”
Quite unlike a typical show, where the audience is supposed to sit quietly and listen, interactive theater audiences are encouraged to take an active role.
Northwest Murder Mysteries, Bingham’s production company, is not his first experience with the theatrical killing business. In fact, he says, putting one on successfully is still something that needs to be learned hands-on.
“Murder Mystery Dinner Theater groups and producers tend to be very secretive,” says Bingham.”There’s no Murder Mystery Dinner Theater 101. I was lucky in that I met somebody who taught me the structure of writing it, and the point — which is to interact with the audience.”
He worked first as an actor, then as a co-author with a producer in San Diego a decade ago, learning the ropes in the process. He went on to produce several shows in Southern California before relocating to the Pacific Northwest.
Bingham says he and his wife Levon, who singlehandedly provides the musical accompaniment to the plays, moved to Seattle hoping for more opportunities on stage and quickly saw one.
“Realizing that [interactive murder-mystery theater] doesn’t exist here and it was here a few years ago, and successfully,” says Bingham, he saw a unique niche to fill.
“I don’t know if there’s anyone else around here that could fill it,” he remarked. “It takes a few years to learn how to run one of these. It’s a lot different than other theaters.”
Chuck Tull saw them perform at a fundraising event for the local food bank put on by the Whatcom County Rotary Club.
“It was a lot of fun, he says. “It was just a very enjoyable way to get together as a group and have a little bit of an event going on within a social gathering,” says Tull.
What Jeff Sears says he enjoys most “is interacting right there with the audience, being right there with them.”
Sears, a radio station board operator in real life, has been a member of the company since it began. He played a French-Canadian lumberjack and union official, Pierre Gaudeau in NWMM’s first production and Hap Hazard, the murder victim in Craggy Rock. He also got a rare opportunity to be the detective, albeit a dead one, as title character in The Ghost Detective last Halloween.
“It’s a lot of freedom to play around and have fun during the performance. It’s kind of challenging, too, because people can do things that throw you off,” says Sears. “You have to acknowledge what they’re doing and try to make it fit in and — at the same time — you have to try to get back onto the script sometime.”
Sears admits that not all the trouble an actor gets into is the work of the audience, however. One night, for instance, playing Hap Hazard at the Crepe Du Paris restaurant in downtown’s Union Square, the performance space itself conspired against him.
“I enter with a song. I normally walk around inside, listening to the piano,” Sears says. “One night I decided to go outside [to the restaurant’s balcony dining area]. The minute I got outside, I couldn’t hear the music anymore. But I kept singing, hoping I was staying in the same tempo as the piano as I walked all the way around the outside.” Remarkably, he says, when he finally made it back in, “I was only a third of a measure off. Levon kept playing while I was out there. I only had to wait half a beat before I could start singing again.”
“It’s a lot of fun,” says Sears . “I like that you have a script but you don’t necessarily have to stick to it to the letter,” especially when he can interact with the audience, an opportunity not often found at local theater productions.
Northwest Murder Myseries performs public shows in the summer vacation and winter holiday seasons. They are available for benefits and private show throughout the year. They can be contacted at 206-491-6446 or on the Web at www.nwmurder.c