Beef & Boards welcomes the New Year with the shrewd set of bafflements in "The Mousetrap"

The highlighted style of ensemble performance typical of Beef & Boards Dinner Theatre works to manic

Trotter has assembled the snowbound residents for interrogation.  

perfection in its season-opening production of "The Mousetrap," the famous Agatha Christie whodunit known for its continuous London run since 1952.

Eddie Curry's direction of the eight-member cast allows for thrilling individualism in portrayals of characters drawn to a rural guest house as British life settles down after the Second World War. Seen Saturday night at the durable Northwestside institution, "The Mousetrap" maintains a nimble pace among the refurbished rooms of Monkswell Manor, a vacation haven under the recent management of newlyweds Giles and Mollie Ralston.

Newlyweds, in business together, have a wee spat. 

The couple, played with adorable eagerness to please by Jae Woo and Malia Munley, find their inexperience as hoteliers challenged to the utmost, first by a severe snowstorm that isolates the establishment, then by the intrusion of a provincial police detective sergeant (Trotter modestly won't allow himself to be addressed as "inspector") on skis. He maintains that he has been sent under such unfavorable conditions to see if Monkswell Manor and anyone living there might have information about a recent murder in London.

The venue's meteorological ill luck has been compounded by its phone lines having mysteriously gone dead. The audience is left to focus solely on Det. Sgt. Trotter's attempts to find out what the proprietors and their guests know and what danger might await them, with the London murder as looming precedent, as well as a long-ago domestic atrocity in the area.  As in much detective fiction, letting yourself be seduced by "The Mousetrap" means that you stay close to Trotter's sleuthing and the tendency of his interrogation. That's as much as I can say about how ripe you are for being misled before the final revelation.

The characters' vivid natures are keenly drawn. Most bizarrely enchanting is Jonathan Cobrda's portrayal of Christopher Wren, who says he was named after the architect of London's 17th-century St. Paul's  Cathedral. He is architecture-bound, he says, but (as Cobrda plays him) his demeanor, full of acrobatic twists and turns and loaded with falsetto shrieks and giggles, casts doubt on his groundedness in reality.

Christopher Wren has peculiar style of honoring Mrs. Boyle.

Eccentricities less outsized but also provoking suspicion are conveyed by free spirit Miss Caswell (Hannah Embree), snowbound motorist Mr. Paravicini (Adam du Plessis) and the bluff, hearty Major Metcalf (Jeff Stockberger). The remaining character, the ill-fated Mrs. Boyle (Suzanne Stark), is simply an annoyance to everyone, particularly the Ralstons. She represents the sort of person anyone she meets might like to do away with, and the end of Act 1 satisfies that scarcely disguised wish. 

I enjoyed how suavely and surprisingly these figures moved around the set, and how self-guided each seemed to be. They made the purportedly professional design of Trotter's investigation resemble the proverbial herding of cats. It's at the prey end of the animal spectrum, specifically the nursery-rhyme victims of "Three Blind Mice," that the play moves thematically. Back stories and alibis weave among one another, with the seeming control of Trotter, ingeniously played by Scot Greenwell, the least likely to be undone. But the genre that "The Mousetrap" so durably represents depends upon unravelling where we might least expect it. This production handles the display of loose ends at a high level of entertaining craft.