Beef & Boards opens season: Legendary train travel blended with glamour, murder
Poirot discovers a gun, to Bouc's and Countess's astonishment. Beef & Boards Dinner Theatre has a sometimes surprising capacity to make stagings of breadth work on its cozy thrust stage. A production of such a range of action across a large cast opens the 2025 season with Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express," as adapted for the stage by Ken Ludwig. Marc Robin shrewdly directs a company brimful of eccentric characters subject to the lab-scientist scrutiny of Hercule Poirot, the author's signature detective, who's imagined from the play's start as a celebrity in mid-1930s Europe. He's among the passengers on the legendary conveyance known as the Orient Express, with a history that ran a century-and-a-quarter and posh terminals in Istanbul and Paris. His friend Monsieur Bouc, charged with operating the line and upholding its sterling reputation, has arranged to get him a place aboard the sold-out train. It will turn out to be a poten...