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Twin Lakes Playhouse opens Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express” at 7 p.m. tonight, and the man playing the detective has spent years on the other side of the crime scene.
Mike Horberg takes on Hercule Poirot. Local audiences have watched him direct “And Then There Were None” in 2019, “The Mousetrap” in 2022 and “Bloody Murder” in 2023. For three shows he decided how the bodies fell. This time somebody else arranges them and he has to work out who did it.
Joanne Helms directs, with Ronna Fulton as assistant director. Helms has said Poirot was the hardest part to cast because the role is so eccentric, and that landing an actor willing to try him is what got the production moving.
Horberg will not be short of suspects. The Ken Ludwig adaptation puts eight of them in the same train car, and every one of them has a reason to lie. Karen Maupin plays the loud American Helen Hubbard, Olivia Wolfe returns as the Countess and Sue Howe plays Princess Dragomiroff.
Christie published the novel in 1934, and nine decades later the ending still holds up as one of the best-kept secrets in popular fiction. Readers who know it tend to remember exactly where they were when they found out. Audiences who do not know it get one shot at guessing before Poirot lays it out.
The show fits a season that has been unusually full of corpses. Season 55 opened in January with “The Villain of Pine Hollow,” an original melodrama Horberg wrote and directed, and it closes Nov. 6 with “A Sherlock Carol,” a holiday whodunit in which a grown-up Tiny Tim asks Sherlock Holmes to look into the death of Ebenezer Scrooge.
Three of the theater’s five productions this year have turned on a suspicious death. The other two were comedies, which by Playhouse standards counts as a break.
Performances run Fridays and Saturdays at 7 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. through Aug. 30. That gives audiences three weekends to make it out to the theater. Tickets are available at tlpmh.org or from the box office at 870-424-0444.
Twin Lakes Playhouse has been staging community theater in Mountain Home since 1971, when founder George Smith held rehearsals in members’ garages. The all-volunteer group produces five shows a year and depends on people who build sets, run lights and sew costumes as much as on the ones who step on stage.
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.
One more piece of advice before the curtain. Whatever you think you have figured out by intermission, you are probably wrong, and Poirot will be polite about it.
