Last Wednesday, Mer took me out on a special midweek date, and we even went up to Cleveland, to Playhouse Square, to the newly renovated and just-opened Allen Theater. Mer had received teacher tickets to go see The Game’s Afoot!, a murder-mystery/comedy about William Gillette, an early twentieth-century stage actor who famously played Sherlock Holmes for over thirty years.

The new theater is magnificent. It is much smaller, since they carved up the old, huge theater into three smaller theaters, but they made it work. There are main-floor seats, and one level of balcony seats, where we sat. All the sight lines are good, and we were able to easily hear, even though the actors were not miked (at least not that I could tell).

The set for the play was jaw-dropping. It was mostly the interior of Gillette’s famous Connecticut mansion, and the set designers went all out. There were exposed beams along the roof-line, wooden floors, a secret room that rotated in the corner, a huge fireplace, a grand staircase and balcony, and ornate doors leading to other rooms. It must have been a set designer’s dream.

The play was very funny. The main death, of an obnoxious theater critic, is played way over-the-top, and is very, very funny. A later death is shown onstage and is very real looking, and I found that disturbing, and very odd in a comedy. Other than the too-realistic death, the play was funny and engaging throughout, and slipped into farce at times, which I enjoyed very much. The combination of really funny humor with a whodunnit plot that engaged the mind (I did not guess correctly) made for a really great, if somewhat late, evening. It was especially worthwhile when Mer told me they were free teacher tickets (which is why we were at a Wednesday showing). A fun play.