Our school’s theatre program has been active for years. Even when Marie Jones, the former theatre director left, Kristen Rendina stepped up to fill the position, and has led proudly for the past few years. 

To avoid becoming stale and boring, the program often experiments with the shows they put on. 

From performing the excessively modern musical, Legally Blonde in 2022, to the classic and historical The Sound of Music earlier this year, The theatre Department is always trying something new.

“I love to keep pushing my students’ repertoire in performance and experience,” Rendina said.

It was only natural to push the envelope even more as the 2023-24 season began. The department decided to put on a whodunit murder mystery called Murder at the Banquet by Robert Lavohn. 

The novelty didn’t stop there, however. It was decided to have the audience sit on the stage where the actors were performing, which is called theater in the round, while also being served a luxury Italian meal. 

The directors had been excited to try this setting for a while. 

“It’s something that we’ve talked about for probably at least a year or two,” Tim Domack, the tech director said. “Kind of the idea of making the space more intimate–the theater space, and that’s kind of what you want for the dinner theme. The audience is immersed in it.”

Before the show even started, the directors had to cast students to perform. 

The play involves a large cast of characters to play such as a sweet old lady who’s smarter than she seems, a suspicious french assistant, a New York detective with his ditsy assistant, a renowned sheriff, the victim and the descendants of Watson and Sherlock Holmes. 

That doesn’t even include the surplus of servants in the background.

“We had people audition to be waiters, and they were acting and dancing during the performance while serving food,” freshman Skylar Talmadge said.

Several people were cast, some for the five o’clock show, some for the seven o’clock show and some for both.

One of the main conflicts of the show was figuring out the menu. This problem was solved by our theater boosters. 

“It’s a bunch of parents volunteers that help us out, and we have meetings once a month about everything, not just about this one thing, and then we have committees within the booster club, and so we had parents that decided on the whole menu, and we decided that the easiest was Olive Garden, as opposed to getting a whole bunch of different menus, and being like ‘ok you can get steak, chicken whatever,’” Domack said.

After tedious rehearsals, the show was about to make its premiere. One hundred seats were available for both of the shows, and they both ended up being sold out performances. 

“I envisioned it to go well,” sophomore Christian Richardson said. “All you really need is confidence when performing, and we all had the confidence.” 

Richardson ended up being right. Both of the performances went extremely well with the community having lots of good feedback.

“Most people said I did really good. They liked the accents other people did, and people said I was loud, which is good,” freshman Lily Hatch said.

This doesn’t mean the performance wasn’t difficult. Certain challenges came upon the actors that they hadn’t faced before. The show was largely interactive with the audience. There was even a scene where an actor had to ask the audience to borrow a pen.

“With the play, you are actually able to feel like you are there, and there was a moment when everyone was scared because they thought their drinks were gonna be poisoned like in the show,” Richardson said.

Though this was fun for the audience, it was just another challenge for the performers.

“Sometimes you had to talk to people, and people got bored very quickly along with it being an hour long,” Hatch said.

The audience participation was all very intentional.

“My vision was to have a fun immersive experience for not only the performers but for the community members,” Rendina said. “Connecting with our audience is our number one goal as a performer, and what better way to do that than for them to be with us in such a quirky and fun story line.”

Even after the show ended, the audience was treated to seeing the murderer being tied up by the head wait staff as they left the auditorium. 

“I was pretty pleased. I think it went better than expected, other than a few things, but I was really impressed with our actors and how our audience participated,” Talamdge said.

Due to the show’s success, it seems very likely that we will do a dinner show again in the future.

“I mean honestly, I think it was an event that we had planned to the hilt, like we planned the mess out of it, so we had it ready to go.Obviously, there were things that came up that we could’ve done differently, and we learned from that, but I think overall the success was huge,” Domack said. “The audience was talking about us. I’ve heard some people in the community that came, they loved it, so I think it’s something that we will definitely do again.”