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Twin Lakes Playhouse opens Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express” on Aug. 14, and the biggest challenge on stage is the train itself.
The entire play takes place aboard one. Director Joanne Helms is building the illusion with periaktoi, rotating three-sided panels painted with a different scene on each face.
Six of the panels give the show three settings. They turn from a restaurant to the train’s exterior to the dining car, then move aside for the sleeping car where the murder happens. Stagehands dressed as porters will make the changes while the audience watches.
Sound carries much of the rest. Scott Ramos is recording effects and voiceovers, including narration for the opening and the flashback scenes. Music for the transitions comes from the score suggested in the script.
Helms is staging the Ken Ludwig adaptation close to the page rather than reinventing it. “I want the comedy, but I want it to happen naturally and not be overplayed,” she said.
The cast mixes veterans of the Twin Lakes stage with first-timers. A familiar local actor takes on the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Karen Maupin plays the brash American Helen Hubbard, Olivia Wolfe returns as the Countess and Sue Howe plays Princess Dragomiroff.
A newcomer plays the victim, an American tycoon named Ratchett. He is found stabbed in his compartment after a snowdrift halts the train overnight, with the door locked from the inside. Every passenger is a suspect.
Christie published the novel in 1934 and built the plot on the Lindbergh kidnapping, which was in the headlines as she wrote. She changed the names.
Ludwig cut the book’s 12 suspects to eight to fit the stage. When his version opened in 2017, it was the first play featuring Poirot to premiere in more than 75 years.
Performances run Aug. 14 through 30 on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.
The production is sponsored by Dauna Powell of Peglar Real Estate and by Josselyn Obregon. It is presented by special arrangement with Concord Theatricals.
