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Twin Lakes Playhouse will stage Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express” from Aug. 14 to 30, putting a full car of suspects and the famous detective Hercule Poirot on the Mountain Home stage.
The Ken Ludwig adaptation runs Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Joanne Helms directs, with Ronna Fulton as assistant director.
Helms said she chose the play because it is a classic and because she enjoyed watching her daughter perform in it. The harder part was casting Poirot. “Poirot is hard to pull off. It’s eccentric,” she said, and finding an actor eager to take him on is what got the show moving.
Helms plans to keep the production close to Christie’s script rather than reinvent it. “I want the comedy, but I want it to happen naturally and not be overplayed,” she said.
“I’m a very black-and-white kind of person,” she said. “If this is what the script says, that’s what we’re going to do.”
The whole play takes place aboard a train, and Helms is solving that with periaktoi, rotating three-sided panels that each show a different painted scene. Six of the units give her three settings, turning from a restaurant to the train’s exterior to the dining car before moving aside for the sleeping car. Stagehands dressed as porters will shift the pieces in choreographed changes the audience can watch.
The cast mixes returning performers with newcomers. Karen Maupin plays the brassy American Helen Hubbard, Olivia Wolfe returns as the Countess and Sue Howe takes on Princess Dragomiroff. Newcomers fill the roles of the victim, Ratchett, and Poirot himself.
“There’s a lot of really cool transition music, and I’ve been working really hard on that,” Helms said. The songs come from copyright-free suggestions built into the script. Scott Ramos is recording sound effects and voiceovers, including narration for the opening and the flashback scenes.
Christie’s novel first appeared in 1934 and remains one of her best known. Ludwig’s version was the first stage play featuring Poirot to premiere in more than 75 years when it opened in 2017. Though the names are changed, Christie built the plot on a real crime, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping that gripped the country as she wrote.
Ludwig trimmed the book’s 12 suspects to eight to fit the stage. His stated goal was to give audiences two hours with glamorous, interesting people.
The production is sponsored by Dauna Powell of Peglar Real Estate and by Josselyn Obregon. It is presented by special arrangement with Concord Theatricals.
