Beef & Boards opens season: Legendary train travel blended with glamour, murder

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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 potentially career-destroying journey for Bouc, at the least. 

Along the way, the trip that's the play's focus becomes snowbound in Yugoslavia, heightening the tension generated by one passenger's brutal killing in his compartment. Resolution of the mystery depends on Poirot's coming up with a path to justice by the time the train is rescued. 

B&B's time-honored production style (louder, faster, funnier)  is established and maintained from the start. The peculiar characters are vivid in their peculiarity, led by the explosively anxious Bouc in a signature Eddie Curry portrayal. 

Confrontations with each other and with the dogged detective tend to be noisy and intense. The brassy American floozy Helen Hubbard (Lanene Charters) has a beef with the haughty Russian Princess Dragomiroff (Suzanne Stark) that threatens to escalate toward a second homicide. 

To establish control over his sleuthing means that Andrew Kindig's Poirot must command a steely voice and, when needed, a glare to match. The detective's habit of careful observance and connecting dots is displayed across a suavity of timing and authority that never flagged in the performance I saw on January 11. 

Passengers gather around a wounded young woman in a tableau that ends the first act and opens the second.
Even when the reality of eight characters' emotional links to the
murder victim dawns on him, Poirot isn't flustered, because he has exposed all the threads of connection meticulously. He must come up with a decision on how to turn over his findings to the authorities in Paris. 

He reminds the diverse group of guilty passengers that without the rule of law, society descends into barbarity. The lesson struck me as especially timely in contemporary American terms, but I will leave its political resonance to others. Prodded by the group, Poirot's decision turns out to amount to the closest thing to a happy ending.

The bundle of personal agendas and histories that feed into the plot with several red herrings are brightly displayed in performances by (besides those already mentioned) Scot Greenwell, Ben Asaykwee, Devan Mathias, Bailey Blaise, Trey Deluna, and Madison Pullins. Jon McHatton strikes the right note of menace in his brief, triggering appearance as Samuel Ratchett, the deserving murder victim.








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