BRYANT — Civitan Services will present its third annual murder-mystery dinner at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Benton Event Center, but this year’s event will be a somewhat different.
“We’ve tweaked it a little bit this year,” said Leigha Jones, community-development director.
“It’s always fun, and everyone always enjoys it, but this year we’ve changed it up just a little. We have a new theme,” Jones said. “Rather than the masquerade-theme we’ve used for the past two years, this year’s theme is based on the play that The Royal Players will present — Murder at Cafe Noir, which is based on the old Hollywood of the 1940s.
“It’s all about style. We’ve taken [the theme] from the play, which is all done in black and white, and we’ve added pops of red, which are the colors of Civitan Services’ logo.”
Bekka Wilkerson, special-events coordinator for Civitan Services, said the play “is a spoof of Casablanca, which starred Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. We hope our patrons will dress up in that classic Hollywood style … if they wish,” Wilkerson said.
“Another change this year is the audience is going to be asked to participate more than before,” Wilkerson said. “They’ll be asked to solve the whodunit, but the interaction will start very early on in the evening. Even in the first act, members of the audience will be asked to guide the actors along a path of action. There is only one ending, but several ways to get to it.”
Wilkerson said chefs from Dinner’s Ready Catering will prepare meals to order on-site at various food stations.
“There will be the wonderful, to-die-for desserts such as Bananas Foster,” she said. “They’re adding chicken skewers to the menu, along with the traditional prime rib and pasta and an assortment of salads and vegetables.”
Wilkerson said another new twist to this year’s event is the addition of a live auction, which will be held right before the final act of the play. Auctioneer Tom Baxley of Baxley-Penfield-Moudy Realtors will sell a variety of items to the highest bidders.
Auction items include three Caribbean vacations, a necklace from Nelson’s Jewelers, a bracelet from Baker’s Fine Jewelry, an Arkansas Razorback football autographed by coach Bret Bielema, artwork by Civitan clients, a duck-hunting party, Costa sunglasses and tickets to a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game.
Dinner will be at 6, followed by the play at 7. Tickets are $75 each or $700 for a table of 10. Tickets are available online at civitanservices.com, on Facebook or by calling (501) 776-0691.
Leah Henderson, executive director of Civitan Services, said proceeds from the fundraiser will be put back into the programs that Civitan offers, as well as retiring the debt for building the new 23,000-square-foot adult-services building and donation center on the Bryant campus.
“We are now in this new building,” Henderson said from her office at 409 S. Reynolds Road in Bryant. “It was a $3.5 million project and took us one year to complete it. We broke ground in February 2015 and moved in March 1 of this year. We now want to retire that debt as soon as possible, especially in light of pending changes in the Medicaid programs and anticipated cuts in funding.
“Our goal is to continue to provide services to adults and children with developmental disabilities without having to make any cuts in our programs. We want to continue to do the good work we have been doing since we opened the Benton campus in 1958.”
Henderson said the Benton campus remains open and now houses just the preschool program for 100 children ages 6 weeks to 5 years. The new adult services building in Bryant currently serves 160 adults. Civitan also offers residential services and community services, as well as the Civitan Shoppe, which is a workplace readiness-training center for adult clients at the Bryant campus and is open to the public as a resale store.
Henderson said the center’s biggest need right now is transportation.
“We just bought a new bus, but it will have to be used on current routes until we can get the maintenance caught up on the other buses,” she said. “We transport 170 clients every day.”
The Royal Players will once again provide the evening’s entertainment with a whodunit play. This year’s production is Murder at Cafe Noir, by David Landau, with music and lyrics by Nikki Stern.
“This is a murder mystery that pays tribute and spoofs the Bogart movies of the 1930s and ’40s,” said Frank O. Butler of Little Rock, director. “The play finds PI Rick Archer in the Falkland Islands after the U.S. invasion. He’s searching for someone’s daughter-gone-wrong but stumbles onto a murder with more suspects, motives and bodies than he had bargained for.
“Throw in a few musical numbers, and you’ve got a fun evening of murder, music and mayhem, where the audience finds themselves hip-deep in the intrigue and shenanigans that go down at the Cafe Noir,” Butler said.
“This murder mystery was specifically designed to be performed during a dinner service, so the actors interact more with the audience, and the audience has a say in some of the play’s actions,” Butler said. “So it’s a fun show that goes beyond just guessing whodunit.
“The show tries to evoke the feeling of those old detective films, with the cast costumed only in black and white and the audience encouraged to dress up in 1940s garb,” he said. “Also, there will be a prize at the end of the evening for one lucky audience ‘sleuth’ who figures out whodunit.”
The cast includes the following:
• Jacob Alan Sturgeon of Little Rock appears as Rick Archer, the private investigator.
• Charlotte Sears Hammonds of Lonsdale portrays Madam Toureau, the manager at Cafe Noir.
• Angela Morgan of Bryant plays Sheila Wonderly, the singer at Cafe Noir.
• Butler appears as Anthony Cairo, a dealer in the black market who is working at the cafe to avoid the police.
• Francesca Bee of Little Rock plays Marie LaRue, a seller of spells and fortunes.
• Tim Sopel of Benton portrays Simon Gutterman, a former British barrister who now caters to the clientele of Cafe Noir.
• Brian Christopher Roberson of Salem plays the roles of Thursby, a gunrunner; Vangilder, a blackmailer; and Rigfield, a British cop.
Butler said Sturgeon and Bee are new to The Royal Players, but the others are veteran actors with the local community theater troupe.
“We portray characters that will be familiar to those lovers of old Bogart films — the private eye, the femme fatale, the young thug, the sketchy character, the exotic torch singer and others,” Butler said.
“I’ve directed murder mysteries before, mostly with The Royal Players — Mousetrap, Witness for the Prosecution and the recent Love From a Stranger,”
Butler said. “This is my first experience with dinner theater, and I’m excited to see the audience’s reaction to some of the fun things we’ve got planned.”