Murder Mystery Blends Feast, Fun
By Woody Weingarten
Marinscope Newspaper

A bountiful meal accompanies Remains to Be Seen, an interactive mystery being staged Friday and Saturday nights at San Rafael Joes.Corny gags. Yet somehow the entire experience leaves an amazingly zesty aftertaste, probably because it's as yummy and fun as a cob slathered with a mound of butter and an ungodly sprinkling of salt.
Written by Lee Mueller, the play makes sure each main suspect gets plenty of playing time. Although there are references to Tennessee Williams and Shakespeare (as well as to vintage films and TV), you'd never mistake Remains to Be Seen for their work (neither was a paisan anyway, right?). The show starts down its wildly zigzag path, rather, with a Rod Serling Twilight Zone knockoff telling about a fetid corpse found in a trunk.
Most participants in the 77-seat room become fully engaged, sifting through envelopes of clues that are handed out, and leaning forward to hear every word in search of hints as to who did what to whom, and why. When they weren't too busy laughing, that is.

Vacaville Gaslighters "Last Call at Chez Mort" is to die for
By Tony Wade
Dailey Republic

VACAVILLE Looking at it from the outside, I suppose it may seem a bit peculiar on a beautiful summer day to go into a darkened room to watch people pretend to be murdered and then try to figure out who did it. Peculiar or not, the Vacaville Gaslighters murder mysteries are a ton of fun and every one I've attended has been packed with would-be detectives. The troupe's latest production is Last Call at Chez Mort and reflects the film noir style of the 1940s. The show features many of the usual suspects, as in cast members who have been in numerous Gaslighters shows. The story is about a nightclub and a conflict about who is to sing there one night. One of the singers is dark-haired Lady Lelu, played with appropriate snark and sass by Naomi Vergara. She was resplendent in a black gown with sparkles and glittering accessories and she also shined while singing the jazz standard "On the Sunny Side of the Street."
Annie Muehlenbruch has shown the ability to play a rather vacuous character accurately and to elicit laughter and not derision or (even worse) pity. She truly nailed the character of Sweet Sue in the current production. With her jarring look � a fluorescent orangish-red feathered wig with matching outfit� and an atonal version of "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off", Muehlenbruch was an absolute scream.
Cathy Knowles was funny as the French woman Jean Paulette Truffaut and Travis Nelson was great as thug Big Suit Stu, who was nearly swallowed by his oversized jacket. Tim Dunlap as Mack, a.k.a "Gertrude", (don't ask) deftly handled some tricky wordplay and was funny in his dustups with Big Suit Stu. Pat Lemley, as reporter Smitty, and Chuck Strong, as Hans the quiet and menacing bodyguard, rounded out the cast nicely. The role of Inspector Eddy Constantine was played with zest and aplomb by Mick Simpson. The whole shebang was tied together in a delightfully seamless bow by director Kerry Brown.

'Murder Me Always' regarded as killer performance

Murder, suspense, mystery, drama, and above all, humor, all came into one compelling performance in the Goleman Players's presentation of "Murder Me Always" a play byLee Mueller. The people who went to see this play were treated to a real show, brimming with audience interaction, non-stop laughs, and to top it all off, a chance to win a free t-shirt for guessing the murderer correctly. The play was presented in a "play within a play" format, in which the actors were playing actors in a show, all set up as a ruse to catch a murderer roaming from theatre to theatre, murdering helpless thespians. Whose job is it to catch the killer before he strikes again?

The stereotypical gumshoe Joe Mamet, played by Esteban Vidal, and his partner Trixie, played by Chantelle Alvarez, who is undercover as the Director's assistant. During the course of the play, the Director herself is murdered, and thus ends the fake play and begins the mystery. "The heated arguments, the contrast between the fake play and real play, solving the murder, and the chance to win prizes made this show stand out, and the cast worked great together, providing new ideas and having lots of fun," says Jacqueline Sanchez, the play's real director.

REVIEW - LIVE THEATER
By Gerry Kowarsky
Special To St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Murder mystery dinner theater is an relaxed form of entertainment for the audience, but the performers have to take their roles just as seriously as they would in any other production. The cast fulfills this obligation admirably in "To Wake the Dead," the current offering of Affton CenterStage Theatre Company. Lee Mueller created the script especially for this production. Mueller is an old hand at this sort of writing. "To Wake the Dead" is his seventh murder mystery for Affton CenterStage. His experience shows.
The action takes place at the time and place of the performance. The occasion: the wake of Fred Finnegan, a successful writer of murder mysteries and supernatural stories. Names based on puns are a common feature of murder mystery dinner theater, and the reference to James Joyce's experimental novel, "Finnegans Wake," is the first of many literary puns.
The mystery has enough suspicious characters to make challenging, but the solution makes sense when it is finally revealed.  Mueller smoothly works in opportunities for the audience to ask questions of the characters and submit written theories of the crime.



YHS Murder Mystery dinner theatre a Success!
by LINDA DORSETT-OTTA
Yucaipa News Mirror
Yucaipa, California

People attending Yucaipa High School's (YHS) Mystery Theatre on Friday became guests to a wedding reception as they entered the campus multi-purpose room. Lee Mueller's hilarious romp into the intricacies of a wedding reception in the play, "I'm Getting Murdered in the Morning." was the feature of the evening. As the audience members was being shown to their seats, they became guests at a wedding reception.

The bride and groom arrived at the reception after dinner had been served. The bride, being a real "daddy's girl", demanded food right then and there. The bride tossed the bouquet and the groom was tossing the bride's garter to the single men when an unknown man falls dead to the dance floor from a gunshot wound. Daddy's little girl insists on continuing her wedding reception despite the body on the floor. She dances with her father while the body is moved to and fro away from their dancing feet. With the disc jockey, the groom's mother Mrs. Coquette, the bridesmaid, best man, damage-control expert and society columnist rounding out the "who-might-have-done-its," the reception guests were kept entertained by music and the antics. The cute, effervescent disc jockey played her part well as a smart aleck. Her comments throughout the play were superb.
The play moved quickly with never a dull moment - even in the serving of the food. Espinoza said he was very pleased with the turn-out and that it was the biggest "in at least the last two years - probably more than ever before."

"Murder Me Always" - The Nagoya Players
Posted by JZ in Japanzine (www.japazine.jp)

Shots ring out from the darkness: a murderer is on the loose, everyone is a suspect, and the ultimate victim is the theatrical Fourth Wall: that imaginary boundary between fiction and reality. The Nagoya Players have continuously brought quality English theater to the central Japanese community for 36 years, and this spring their season starts with a BANG!
Full of jokes with appeal to theater buffs and newcomers alike, this outing will appeal to all fans of Clue as well as whodunits both serious (Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None), and spoof (Neil Simon's Murder By Death). Everyone involved with the show is very excited by the collaborative, creative atmosphere during rehearsals and looking forward to the production weekends with great anticipation. Asked for his thoughts on the effort Daniel Ostrander said, Clue has got to be both my all time favorite movie and board game. I love murder mysteries; they're the closest to being Batman that most of us will ever get!

"Death Of A Doornail" - Manoel Theatre
Posted by Andre Delicata in Times Of Malta

MADC's last weekend proved to be an entertaining piece because it turned all preconceived ideas about the genre on their heads. The production was in the good hands of its duo of directors Coryse Borg and Pia Zammit, who infused it with their own personal sense of humour. What was enjoyable about the piece was that it didn't set out to take itself seriously. It was light entertainment from beginning to end.

Lee Mueller's script took all the basic stock characters in a murder mystery and hyperbolised their idiosyncrasies, making them caricatures of themselves, while poking subtle fun at figures in pop culture. the audience was guaranteed a good time which, thanks to its self-deprecating humour, certainly murdered boredom completely.