This Murder was Staged
I saw this performance on November 23rd, 2024 with my family. The Youth
Laguna Playhouse produced a fantastic production of This Murder was Staged. Written
by Patrick Greene and Jason Pizzarello, the show starts with an actual production, still
being a murder mystery. When they find their director dead in the closet, they break
character and ask if there is a doctor in the audience. A plant jumps out of their seat,
revealing they’re a detective instead, and walks on stage. They start an investigation
pointing fingers at everybody. Everyone has a motive for the murder, which makes
solving it incredibly difficult. They do flashbacks and The play concludes with every
single actor being responsible for the murder. It’s a comedy as in the
One person’s performance that specifically stood out to me was Sydney
Schaarsmith. She played the detective and her acting was very engaging. She used a
very entertaining accent that kept the audience laughing. I was always waiting for her to
be on stage after every backstory. She stuck out to me because of the way she
interacted with the other characters and her delivery of her lines. She got a chunk of the
laughs from the audience. I would like to play one of the “actors”. Specifically the girl in
pink, the “lead”. I would like to because of her role in the story and how she was the
drama queen of the story but also a strong character.
The technical elements that stuck out to me were the lights when going into a
flashback. They were a flowing mix of blue and purple. They used a fun warping sound
as well. I thought it was a little on the nose but it worked for this production. I think this
would be a good play to perform at school because of how many roles and characters
there are. There are “crew” members that are on stage and contribute to the story. I think
we could play around with how much crew there would actually be since not all of them
are speaking roles. That could be a benefit. A drawback would be that there are a few
plants which means less seats to sell. We’ve done that in the past so it would be up to
the director to decide if that would be worth it.
I really enjoyed this production because of how fun it was and unpredictable. It
felt like anything could happen at any moment with how many plot twists there were. I
thought the ending was surprising but I was expecting a little more to come out of it. I
also thought the first act was dragging but they kind of acknowledged that so it became
a joke. I would definitely recommend it to others if they are going for a night of laughs
and guessing.
