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Can a fussy Belgian detective solve a stabbing in a locked compartment before the snow melts? Can six painted panels turn a Mountain Home stage into a luxury train crossing Europe? Can the man who wrote this season’s opener keep a 92-year-old secret for three straight weekends?
Answers start at 7 p.m. Friday.
Twin Lakes Playhouse opens Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express” on Aug. 14. Friday and Saturday curtains are at 7 p.m., and Sunday matinees start at 2 p.m.
Mike Horberg takes on Hercule Poirot, the detective Christie built out of tidy habits and an enormous ego. Local audiences know Horberg as the writer and director of “The Villain of Pine Hollow,” the original melodrama that opened the Playhouse’s 55th season back in January. This time somebody else is running the show and he has to solve the murder.
Director Joanne Helms has said Poirot was the hard part to cast. He is eccentric, he is famous, and getting an actor eager to take him on is what got the production moving.
The setup around him is the most famous in mystery fiction. A snowdrift stops the train overnight somewhere in the mountains, and an American passenger named Ratchett turns up dead in the morning, stabbed in a compartment locked from the inside.
Nobody got on. Nobody got off. That leaves the passengers, and every one of them is lying about something.
Helms is working from Ken Ludwig’s adaptation, which Christie’s estate commissioned and which first reached a stage in 2017. It was the first play built around Poirot in more than 75 years. Ludwig cut the book’s 12 suspects to eight and let more jokes through, but the detective still runs the case.
Helms is staying close to the script rather than reinventing it. Ronna Fulton is assistant director.
The rest of the car is stacked with people worth watching. Karen Maupin plays the brassy American Helen Hubbard, Olivia Wolfe returns as the Countess and Sue Howe takes on Princess Dragomiroff, the kind of aristocrat who answers a murder investigation like she is doing you a favor.
The train itself is the other lead role. Helms is building it with periaktoi, three-sided rotating panels painted with a different scene on each face.
Six of them give the show three settings. They spin from a restaurant to the outside of the train to the dining car, then clear the way for the sleeping car where the killing happens. Porters do the turning in full view of the audience.
Scott Ramos handles the rest of the illusion with recorded sound effects, voiceovers and narration for the flashbacks.
Christie published the novel in 1934 and pulled her plot from the Lindbergh kidnapping, which was in the papers while she wrote. Readers in 1934 recognized exactly what she was doing.
Twin Lakes Playhouse has been staging plays in Mountain Home since 1971, when founder George Smith ran rehearsals in members’ garages. The all-volunteer group puts on five shows a year, and this is season 55.
The production is sponsored by Baxter Health, Dauna Powell with Peglar Real Estate Group, Albright Farms, Tasty Greens and Josselyn Obregon. It is presented by special arrangement with Concord Theatricals.
Tickets are available at tlpmh.org or from the box office at 870-424-0444. The solution is included in the price, but only if you stay to the end.
