Notes
Director’s Note
Sometimes our experience of theatre is life-altering—some drama touches our soul, or hits a nerve. It’s fulfilling and emotional. Other times, we seek out theatre for the excitement, the thrill, for the virtuoso performance, the athletic dance number, the exquisite singing.
But sometimes we’re just craving entertainment—that pure, unadulterated fun, with no agenda, no lesson-to-be-learned, no emotional toll to be taken. We want to laugh, to be surprised, to be transported to other places and times, to hear someone else’s story.
That’s the case tonight.
I saw Something’s Afoot when I was in high school and have wanted to do it ever since. When I went back to the script last winter, considering it for this season, I was a little afraid that my teenage love affair with the show might have just been that…but no. The play’s unique charm, fun, and simplicity drew me in again. I became convinced it was a perfect choice for our PTC audiences: familiar yet new, entertaining of course, but also clever.
And we know these characters.
We know them from playing the board game Clue as children. We know them from the Agatha Christie stories we read, when we were first developing a taste for grown-up literature. There’s Flint, the lecherous caretaker; Lettie, the saucy maid; Colonel Gillweather; the blustering old army man; Miss Tweed, the amateur detective; Hope and Geoffrey, the sweet young lovers—we grew up with these characters. They almost seem like part of the family.
So I invite you to sit back and enjoy a show whose only purpose is to entertain you and, as Shakespeare might have said, to help you beguile away a few hours in pleasant reverie.
Enjoy the smart lyrics and the catchy tunes in between the characters being menaced by an unseen murderer. If we send you out of the theatre with a spring in your step and a smile on your face, so much the better.
(See if you can guess who the killer is!)
– Karen Azenberg