Mystery Dinner Playhouse

Laura and I were talking today and realized that 17 years ago tonight, Friday October 15, 1993, we opened our first show in Richmond.  Those days we performed at the Holiday Inn Koger Center, right off of Midlothian Turnpike.  Roy Proctor, the theater critic for the Richmond Times Dispatch had written two very nice articles about this crazy couple from Minneapolis, Jim Daab and his wife, Laura Daab, who moved to Richmond to open a mystery dinner theater. The exposure helped get the word out and we opened our first show, “Let’s Kill the Boss!” to sold out houses.

Our first cast was great!  Frank Minor, Flora DeCastri, Terry Lee Adams, Eric O’Brien, Mark Wells, and, of course, Ronald Blankenship. What a bunch of troopers.  They took our wacky form of theater and ran with it.  We considered casting a young actor named Harry Kollatz, Jr, but he decided to take himself out of consideration because he’d just been offered a new job at Richmond Magazine. Our actors have become like family, and as in any family, we have sadly lost members over the years.  Paige Keinel, Carlton Candler, and Mary Sue Carroll, all left us too soon, and are missed terribly.

There were several other theaters in Richmond that formed in 1993, including The Firehouse Theater Project (there’s Harry again) and The Triangle Players.   We were fortunate enough to hook up with these companies, and others such as The Barksdale and Theatre IV, to help form the Richmond Alliance of Professional Theaters (RAPT).  It helped us integrate into the local theater community, and form friendships that are still strong 17 years later.

Sometime around 1995, I came home one day and Laura said, “We had a woman call and asked if we could do a medieval show, and I told them you’d write one.”  So since that time I’ve been writing our shows.  I have about 30 shows in my catalogue, and have been licensing the performance rights to groups all over the country.  You can currently see “Frankly Scarlet, You’re Dead” at the Great Smoky Mountain Mystery Dinner Show, and “Marriage Can Be Murder!” at the Savannah Murder Mystery Dinner Theater, in Savannah Georgia.

In 1998 we expanded to Williamsburg in what is now the Clarion Inn and Suites. 1999 found us opening at the DoubleTree in Virginia Beach, and six years down the road, we opened a location in Northern Virginia, finally settling into the Sheraton Crystal City.

Laura often points out that running a business is sort of like raising a child.  Like a child, we’re amazed at how it’s changed, and grown. And despite the grey hairs it has caused, we still love it.

Jim Daab