Rio Hondo College Newspaper

El Paisano

Rio Hondo College Newspaper

El Paisano

Rio Hondo College Newspaper

El Paisano

Nuts to Die For – Rio Theater department serves comedy

by Krystyn Bristol

This past weekend, the theater department of Rio Hondo College successfully produced their very first “Murder Mystery Dinner” event in the Campus Inn.

Developed by the Artists Creating Theater (ACT) club and the Improv team, the dinner showcase built a relationship between the audience and the actors while the guests attempted to guess who committed the homicide.

With the same type of storyline as the classic “Clue” games, the show opened with a set of 10 monologues performed by each of the suspects of the murder of Ronald Stump. Stump’s 50th birthday was the reason of the dinner celebration, but the party quickly came to a halt when his birthday cake exploded in his face and killed him.

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Stump’s former relationships with the suspects ranged everywhere between his newly widowed wife to his opponent for the position of town mayor.

After they each introduced themselves and their defending stories, the audience had the opportunity to interrogate each of them for five minutes. The suspects took turn rotating between tables improvising their answers to our questions as we dined and enjoyed Lascari’s, who agreed to cater the event.

The show’s crewmembers also individually handed out clues to further help the audience guess which person had murdered Stump.

The show ran for a total of about two hours, and ended with the reveal of the criminal, who was Miss Millions, played by Thuy Ta.

“It was kind of hard not to crack when people were interrogating me,” she said. “I wasn’t really expecting the questions that I got. Everyone was doing a really great job at being his or her character, from head to toe. I’m really surprised that people didn’t suspect that I was the murderer, but I’m hoping that means that I did a good job.”

With a ticket price of $15, guests got to enjoy a plate of dinner and an interactive, humorous, and overall very amusing show. The ACT club and Improv team are looking to continue the semester tradition of the Murder Mystery Dinner during the Fall semester.

Until then, be sure to catch the same group of talented individuals and some of the Theater 170 course in their free admission performance of “Our Town” the weekend of April 25 – 28 in the old Campus Inn building.

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