I am surprised that no one has responded yet . . . .

We do a regular Dinner Mystery Theater and have had good success with it. We started doing the mysteries a couple of years ago. Before we started, I went to several different shows to get a feel of what is out there and how they work. Like everything else, there is a wide range of styles. At one end is a fully staged production with very little (or no) audience participation. at the other end, there are few actors and rely more on audience participation.

I think the greatest number of Dinner Mystery Theater productions use actors doing their parts while wandering through the diners. Again, some use a lot of audience participatipon and some use very little. Humor and responding well to comments from the audience is critical. My largest criticism about htose I have seen is the inability of actors to improv and incorporate the audience comments into the flow of teh evening. At a recent DMT I went to, there was very little audience participation but when the detective suggested that the wife killed her husband to gain access to his estate of $421,000,000, one woman in the audience shouted out: "Honey, that ain't near enough". Of course everyone broke up except the actors who were not able to capitalize on that special moment.

I have been to several where I was given a small card with instructions for my character: "When X says: I think the wife did it, I was supposed to stand up and shout: She couldn't have done it - she was with me at the time". Not high drama but fun.

We finally wrote our own script. We decided to go all the way to the other end of the spectrum. We only use one actor - the detective who comes in at the end of the dinner to "solve" the crime. Each diner is assigned a part in the mystery - including the guy who committed the crime. We give each attendee a 5 by 8 card which has specific information about the character they are playing. The diners are expected to make up a lot of history about their character and they spend a get acquainted social hour before dinner asking each other questions trying to solve the mystery. No one is allowed to lie or change any of the specific information about their character except the guilty person who can say anything he wants. The play requires a minimum of 15 people and has roles for a maximum of 35 people.

From my experience, the larger the audience, the less audience participation there is. We do our mystery in small restaurants. We charge $5.00 per person attending which is paid by the restaurant. They set the menu and prices.

Hope this helps. When you are doing audience participation work, you must have actors who can have fun and deal with the unexpected while keeping in character and keeping the plot moving along.

Doug

I'd love to see a script. I ordered a few from Mysteries by Moushey, they're ok but I agree with Doug there must be some good improv going on also. Email me at jillc99@aol.com
Thanks for the input.

Would love to see synopsis of your scripts for dinner theater mysterys, I represent River Valley Players Rock Rapids, Iowa