By Brian Caws, Jean Daigle, Ken MacDougall
At Mysteriously Yours…Mystery Bistro Theatre
Opened March 26, 2010

   The audience is supposedly at a Symposium for the Enlightenment of Criminal Sciences, hosted by famed scientist Madame Curie, and at which presentations are to be made by Alexander Graham Bell, Dr. Henry Jekyll, Prof. Jan Jansky, and Dr. Sigmund Freud. A fine kettle of fish, including a number of red herrings. Fact and a great deal of fiction mix in a sort of wild stew, and anachronisms abound, but this is to be expected at Mysteriously Yours, where mad silliness is mixed with ratiocination of a high order, and all served up after dinner that includes a swell grilled flat iron steak with waffle chips, sautéed vegetable, and caramelized shallot jus, and a Black Forest Tower with stewed Bing cherries. Dinner on the opening night was a relaxed affair, more relaxed than it had a right to be, with the actual theatrical entertainment delayed by at least an hour—which is roughly the length of the piece itself. Not a good proportion, what! However, most in the audience found it well within their hearts to forgive this inordinate delay, though I was less forgiving of the mystery piece because it represented what is the weakest aspect of this bistro theatre: the looseness of plot and characterization. In this instance, the weakness was compounded by incongruities that, while hilarious, made no sense—to wit, a Madame Curie (Debbie Collins) with a French Canadian accent, or an Alexander Graham Bell (Ken MacDougall) who seemed to be a Newfie intellectual ancestor of Forrest Gump.

   But anachronism, incongruity, bad puns, zany comedy, and ham acting are the very stuff of Mysteriously Yours entertainment, which is really a take-no-prisoners type of comic mystery. Anyway, the gist of the piece is this: Dr. Henry Jekyll’s presentation of his radical approach to investigating the criminal mind is interrupted by the sudden murder of one Anderson Scooper. There are, as usual, several suspects. In this story, these include Prof. Jan Jansky, a Czech criminologist from CSI Prague, Dr. Sigmund (“If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother”) Freud, Bell (who always seems to be on the wrong dial), Ivy (Jekyll’s assistant), Madame Curie herself, and the Hyde personality of Dr. Jekyll, though some rather bibulous audience members even saw Jekyll as a possible suspect. There are twists and turns aplenty, and enough corn to feed Africa, and the performers (led by Jean Daigle) often seem to be having a whale of a time, but I still longed for a better play.

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