About
Edgar Allan Poe is throwing a murder mystery dinner party, and you’re invited—alongside his ghostly sidekick Lenore and a room full of famous authors, all with something to hide. But as the wine flows and the fake murders become real, guests start dropping like flies. Whodunnit? Why!? And who’s next?!!
Join literary legends from Mary Shelley and Lewis Carroll to Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde as they scramble to solve the mystery, protect their secrets, and defend their outsized egos.
Based on the hit web series, this brand-new musical serves up mystery, mayhem, and original songs in one delightfully deadly night of theatre.
Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party: The Musical was brought to life thanks to 1,887 backers on Kickstarter.
Tickets
through Saturday, August 29
Los Angeles, CA
Tickets are nonrefundable. Exchanges are available for a per-ticket fee.
For full venue and box office details, visit the Garry Marshall Theatre website.
THE TEAM
Music & Lyrics by: Dylan Glatthorn
Book & Lyrics by: Sean Persaud & Sinead Persaud
Choreography By: James Tolbert
Directed by: William J. Stribling
Produced by: Brian Rosenthal
Scenic Design: Alexander Whittenberg
Lighting Design: Erica Ammerman
Costume Design: Morgan Gannes
Sound Design: Robert Ramirez
Properties Master: Mari Carlson
Production Stage Manager: Lanae Wilks
Asst. Stage Manager: Max Kunke
Fight Choreography: Jennifer Nelson
Asst. Director: Leah Jacobson
Asst. Scenic Designer: Gavin Mosier
CAST
Whitney Avalon
Lana McKissack
Tom DeTrinis
Ryan W. Garcia
Tommy Hobson
Sarah Grace Hart
Tom Lenk
Lauren Lopez
Curt Mega
Sean Persaud
Sinead Persaud
Joey Richter
Blake Silver
Mary Kate Wiles
The Authors
EDGAR ALLAN POE American writer, poet, and critic best known for The Raven, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Fall of the House of Usher. A master of the macabre, Poe also helped establish the conventions of the modern detective story with tales featuring his amateur sleuth C. Auguste Dupin.
LEWIS CARROL English author, mathematician, and photographer best known for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Lewis Carroll was actually the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who, when not writing, was a mathematics lecturer at Oxford.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS French novelist and playwright best known for The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. He was a serious gourmand and wrote a 1,000-page dictionary of cooking, Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine.
MARY SHELLEY English novelist best known for Frankenstein, which she began writing when she was just 18 years old. The story originated during a famously gloomy summer in Switzerland spent with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and others, when the group challenged one another to write ghost stories.
OSCAR WILDE Irish playwright, novelist, poet, and legendary wit best known for The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Famous almost as much for his personality as his writing, Wilde became one of Victorian London’s most recognizable celebrities and was known for his flamboyant dress and razor-sharp conversation.
JANE AUSTEN English novelist and keen observer of romance, class, and social absurdity, best known for Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma. Austen published her novels anonymously during her lifetime, with Sense and Sensibility originally credited simply to “A Lady.”
EMILY DICKINSON American poet whose nearly 1,800 poems include “Because I could not stop for Death” and “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Dickinson spent most of her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, and only 11 of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY American novelist and journalist known for his famously spare prose and works including The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 and was also a passionate fisherman and notorious womanizer.
H. G. WELLS English writer best known for science-fiction classics The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, and The Island of Doctor Moreau. Often called one of the fathers of science fiction, Wells also wrote Little Wars, a rulebook for playing war games with toy soldiers.
GEORGE ELIOT The pen name of English novelist Mary Ann Evans, author of Middlemarch, Silas Marner, and The Mill on the Floss. Evans adopted a male pen name early in her fiction career, in part to ensure that her novels would be taken seriously by critics and readers.
ANNABEL LEE The title character of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee,” first published shortly after Poe’s death in 1849. The poem tells of a love so powerful that even death and the jealous angels themselves cannot separate its young lovers.
LENORE The lost love mourned in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Lenore,” a dark meditation on grief, death, and remembrance. Poe reworked the poem several times throughout his life, transforming an earlier poem titled “A Pæan” into the “Lenore” known today.
Director’s Note
Welcome, friends, to Edgar Allan Poe's Murder Mystery Musical.
Thank you for being here and supporting independent theatre. If you'll indulge me, I'd like to take a minute to impress upon you just how unlikely it is that we're all gathered here in this room today. Back in 2004, when I started high school at a magnet program for musical theatre, I met a senior named Dylan Glatthorn. We both went to NYU, and during my senior year I met a very talented, quiet writer named Sinéad Persaud, as well as a less quiet but equally talented cinematographer named Alex Gallitano. There was no way to know it at the time, but that first collaboration — a senior thesis half-hour pilot — would be the first of many between the four of us.
Fast-forward four years. Sinéad emailed me after seeing the trailer for my second feature film, in search of a director for a web series she had written with her brother. That series was Edgar Allan Poe's Murder Mystery Dinner Party, a project I'm still quite proud of. That shoot was a whirlwind: fast, scrappy, endlessly challenging, but equally rewarding. Much fun was had on that set, and I formed friendships with so many lovely people — friendships that are still flourishing to this day.
The road that brought us all here has been long and winding. At any point in the last 22 years, it could have forked and sent all of our lives and careers in any number of directions. And somehow it always finds a way to bring us together again. I'm so very glad that things have played out as they have.
The hallmark of a Shipwrecked project, in my experience, has been a combination of incredible ambition, a hilarious script, a cast of hilarious and hilariously talented actors, near-impossible scope and scale, never enough time or resources, the feeling that this is the hardest thing I've ever done, joyful days of creativity, a score by musical prodigy Dylan Glatthorn of which we are not worthy, and yet somehow we pull it off and still love each other after it's over.
This musical has been no different. What began as a modest idea — to mount a concert-style adaptation of the original series with a few songs tossed in — evolved into the full-blown production with all the bells and whistles and bassoons you came here to see. If you're reading this director's note, it means that this thing is actually happening, miraculously and against all odds. Well, maybe not all odds, but most of them.
Mere days ago, this theatre was entirely empty. I'd nearly forgotten how magical this experience is, making something from nothing. Seeing it all come together so quickly fills me with joy and a fair bit of anxiety. Most of all, I'm excited and eager to share this show with a live audience.
The show you're here to see is the work of a group of people who love each other, who love working together, who respect each other's craft, and who keep finding excuses to get together to make things.
Thank you again for being here. I hope you enjoy what we've cooked up for you this time around.
—William J. Stribling