On June 18-20, the Lake Central Theatre Company performed its summer show, “The Murderous Mansion of Mr. Uno,” at Clark Middle School.
In this show, Mr. Uno invited six guests to his home. Shortly into his party, Mr. Uno winds up dead, and the guests must figure out who the murderer is before it is too late.
“I loved doing my character because she’s really different from how I am. I’m not really super flirty, but she is. It was cool because she was close enough to me, but still a challenge because she’s so different. I really loved doing the challenge,” Alexa Spasevski (10) said.
The show was a dramatic comedy that followed the style of the murder-mystery movie, “Clue,” which has several different endings. During intermission, the audience was asked to vote for who they believed the killer was.
“All of the characters have an ending, but we only picked four of them because we wanted to keep it shorter. We thought it would be best this way because we didn’t want to keep the audience there for eleven different endings because that would confuse them. We were trying to take the approach of “Clue,” where they show every different ending, so it was to see a combination of all of the characters,” Brett Balicki (12) said.
This style of play was different for much of the cast, which had never performed a murder mystery.
“I loved doing this play. I’ve never done a murder mystery before. It was interesting to try doing one now and seeing what it’s like doing one because I ended up really liking it. Whenever I see murder mysteries, I’ve really loved them because they kept me thinking, ‘Oh, who’s the murderer?” Now I feel that it’s really awesome to have this experience,” Balicki said.
Most of the theater company is used to doing shows in the fall or spring, but the summer show offers something different to the actors.
“The summer show is definitely more relaxed. We had three weeks of rehearsals scheduled, but only wound up having to do three days instead of the full seven days, and each of those days we cut time off. It’s definitely a lot more relaxed, which is really nice. I love acting, and I love this group of people, so I wanted to spend the summer doing something that I loved,” Spasevski said.
