SEAKING - Murder Mystery Dinner Party
Client: Bluestone T.O. for SEAKING
Why: The client directly asked for an exclusive kind of interactive entertainment during a gala dinner for about 50 people. To make matters worse, the people involved were of different ages and each of them sought after different levels of direct involvement.
When: September, 8th 2007
Where: “Palmento La Rosa” – Pedara (CT)
What: For once, we didn’t need to think a lot about what to propose: we already had the perfect product for the occasion, and it was one of our most talked-of event – a Murder Mystery Dinner Party.
This is an exclusive kind of entertainment, a special pièce of interactive theatre especially made to be played during a dinner, between the courses..
How: A “Murder Mystery Dinner Party” is probably one of the most used (and abused) form of entertainment proposed in the MICE field all over the world. But it’s important to note that, under the same name, you can find a lot of different formats!
Most of them are some kind of role-playing games where the participants have to play some roles themselves, but these formats suffers from a lot of drawbacks, at least in this conditions: first of all, the participants are not experienced actors, so you cannot foresee if they will correctly play the role or forget to say something important; also, you can’t avoid some audio problems, and you just cannot predict the length of the play. We do agree that murder-mystery role-playing games are of great entertainment value if your group is no more than 20-25 people (we do have scripted and successfully played a lot of them in this conditions!), but we do needed a more “structured” event.
We already had the right script for the occasion: an original 3-act murder-mystery set in Sicily in the fascinating thirties.
Each interactive act is played between (not during) the courses and lasts about 12 minutes: the right length to make all the people involved, but not to lengthen the dinner too much!
We immediately started to rehearse with the 6 already experienced interactive-actors needed for the show. The chosen day, the technicians mounted the PA system and checked the microphones, while the actors put on their costume dresses. Period music was played while the guests entered the dining room.
The show had already begun.
