Lipstick, Lies & Alibis Brings Murder Mystery Theater to Mobile’s Carnival Museum

Mobile Mystery Dinners and the MMD Players stage their next whodunit, Lipstick, Lies & Alibis, on Saturday, August 13, 2011, inside the Mobile Carnival Museum — with doors at 6:30 p.m., curtain at 7 p.m., and reservations taken by phone at 251-479-3212 before it sells out. The venue alone makes the evening worth the ticket: the museum, housed in a historic mansion in downtown Mobile, preserves the city’s centuries-old Mardi Gras tradition, and its gowns, scepters and procession memorabilia give a murder mystery party a backdrop few theaters could match.

The setup: guests are invited to a “life” celebration for the grand Madame Vanderbilt, hosted by her oldest and dearest friend Ari Verderci. Among the party guests are Sunshine, Verderci’s niece, and her fiancé Augie — whose mysterious past may catch up with him once he spots certain names on the guest list — along with Mr. Heath Gargamel, who has his eye on Sunshine. The company’s advice to diners: watch your back, and your date.

A “life” celebration, of course, is exactly the kind of gathering where old grudges and older secrets tend to surface, and the premise gives the MMD Players plenty of room to work. Every guest on the list arrives with a reason to be nervous, and as the evening unfolds the diners themselves become witnesses, suspects and occasional accomplices as the plot threads tangle. The play-within-the-party format keeps the audience close to the action, with the mystery building between courses rather than across a distant stage.

The Deal: Dinner, Wine and a Play for $57

Tickets run $57 per person for a three-hour evening that includes an unlimited wine bar starting at 6:45, a multi-course catered meal by Creative Catering, plus a tour of the Carnival Museum itself. The menu leans Gulf Coast: shrimp remoulade to start, pecan-encrusted white fish as the main and chocolate turtle cheesecake with raspberry drizzle for dessert. For the price, guests get dinner theater, an open bar and admission to one of Mobile’s most distinctive museums — a combination that has made the company’s shows a reliable date-night draw in a city that takes its celebrations seriously.

The wine bar opens fifteen minutes before doors, which means early arrivals can settle in with a glass while the cast begins working the room. By the time the catered first course lands, the story is already in motion, and the museum tour folded into the evening doubles as a chance to stretch between acts while taking in the regalia of Carnival seasons past.

The Carnival Museum setting is more than decoration. Mobile’s Carnival celebration predates New Orleans’, tracing its organized beginnings to the early 1700s, and the museum preserves the proof: coronation gowns, trains and scepters of past kings and queens, float designs, and the pageantry of mystic societies that have paraded the streets of downtown Mobile for generations. Holding a tale of secrets and suspicion among that pageantry gives the night a distinctly Mobile flavor — mystery served with a side of the city’s own history.

A Cast of Local Regulars

The cast is led by director April Siotis and producer Virginia McKean, with Cassidy Ballot directing the play-within-the-party and a dozen local players filling roles from Det. Shirley Holmes (Dorrie Smith) to cab driver Justin Case (LV Conway). The tongue-in-cheek character names signal the company’s tone: murder mystery as comedy first, with the mystery itself a running game between cast and audience. The MMD Players have built a following on that formula, mixing seasoned local performers with character actors who spend as much time among the tables as on any stage.

Dinner theater of this kind depends on the cast’s ability to improvise around the diners, and the MMD Players’ roster is built for it. With a dozen performers populating the party, nearly every table of guests ends up seated near a suspect, and the actors stay in character from the first pour of wine to the final reveal. Detectives interrogate, cabbies gossip, and the hosts of the “life” celebration keep the party moving toward its inevitable discovery — that someone in the room is not who they claim to be.

The interactive format also means no two performances play out identically. Audience questions can steer scenes, suspicions voiced over dessert become part of the final deduction, and the cast rewards guests who play along with their own accusations. For regulars of the Mobile mystery circuit, part of the appeal is seeing how the same script bends around different rooms and different crowds.

A Full Season of Suspicion

The August show kicks off a busy fall schedule that keeps the company on the move across the area. On September 1, the troupe presents The Headless Pirate of Dauphin Island at the Café Royal, taking the murder to the barrier island whose own history of shipwrecks and pirates gives a ghostly whodunit natural footing. On September 17, Murder in Jest at Comealot Castle returns to the Carnival Museum, trading party manners for medieval intrigue.

October brings the busiest stretch of the calendar. On October 15, Insanity of Murder is staged aboard the Southern Belle for Alabama Cruises, letting passengers watch the mystery unfold on the water while the Mobile River and the city skyline slide past. A week later, on October 22, the company presents Unhappy Hour at Fitzpen Place, a cocktail-hours mystery that plays the genre’s drawing-room roots for laughs.

The Halloween weekend belongs to the historic Malaga Inn, where the company stages a two-day Murder Mystery Halloween Weekend on October 29–30, complete with ghost tours, psychic readings and two cocktail parties. The inn, set in the heart of the Church Street East historic district with its courtyard and ironwork galleries, is among Mobile’s most atmospheric addresses, and a murder mystery layered onto Halloween weekend in one of the city’s oldest buildings is as close to a perfect match as the genre offers. Costumes, inevitably, are encouraged.

The fall run closes on November 12 with ‘Twas the Murder Before Midnight back at the Carnival Museum, an early start on the holiday season that gives the company one more date in the Government Street landmark before Carnival’s own calendar begins to dominate the city’s attention.

For Mobile audiences, the schedule amounts to a tour of the city’s most atmospheric venues — an island café, a riverboat, a historic inn, and the museum of the city’s signature celebration — each paired with a catered meal and a mystery built for the room. Tickets for each show are sold by reservation, and the company’s August production at the Carnival Museum follows the pattern the fall shows will repeat: call ahead, arrive hungry, and trust no one at the table.

Reservations for Lipstick, Lies & Alibis are available by phone at 251-479-3212, and with the museum’s intimate rooms and a cast of a dozen, seats are limited. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., the wine bar begins pouring at 6:45, and the curtain rises at 7 — after which the only safe assumption is that everyone in the room, from the host to the cab driver, is hiding something.

The genre itself has deep roots in Mobile’s entertainment scene. Murder mystery dinner theater thrives in cities with a taste for pageantry and social theater, and Mobile — a town that organizes itself around secret societies, masked balls and invitation-only parties for two centuries — has proven an ideal home for it. Companies like Mobile Mystery Dinners fill the gap between the city’s major theatrical stages and its carnival season, offering performance year-round in rooms where the audience is close enough to touch the suspects.

The appeal is easy to see. A conventional play asks the audience to sit still and watch; a mystery dinner asks them to eat, drink, speculate and take sides. The three-hour format gives the story room to breathe across courses, with the wine bar keeping the mood loose and the museum tour providing a natural intermission. Guests who arrive as strangers to the people at their table leave having argued about alibis together, which is exactly the sort of communal experience dinner theater was invented to provide.

The character names on the Lipstick, Lies & Alibis guest list — a detective named Shirley Holmes, a cab driver named Justin Case — tell newcomers everything they need to know about the company’s sensibility. This is mystery as social comedy, closer to a carnival confection than to noir. The Madame Vanderbilt premise, a celebration held in her honor among a crowd of guests with tangled motives, lets the cast mine drawing-room manners for laughs while still laying out a puzzle the diners can solve.

The Carnival Museum rewards visitors who take the included tour seriously as well. Its collection spans generations of Mobile Carnival history, from the earliest printed invitations and ball programs to the elaborate trains and gowns worn by queens of the city’s oldest mystic societies. Displays trace the evolution of floats, torch-lit processions and the societies that organize the season each year, offering newcomers a crash course in why Mobile’s celebration holds a legitimate claim as the oldest in the country. Between the mystery’s acts, the tour gives diners a guided look at artifacts most visitors pay separate admission to see.

Dinner and the setting work in tandem, too. Creative Catering’s menu — Gulf shrimp to start, pecan-encrusted white fish at the center, turtle cheesecake to close — reads like a tour of local tables, the kind of meal a Mobile host would put in front of honored guests. Pecan-crusted fish is a Gulf Coast staple, and pairing it with an evening of over-the-top theatrical scheming in a mansion full of Mardi Gras regalia makes the whole night feel like a period piece with dessert.

Whether Lipstick, Lies & Alibis sells out its August date or not, the fall schedule behind it gives Mobile mystery fans little reason to wait for another season. The company’s productions have become a fixture of the local social calendar, and the chance to solve a murder inside the city’s Carnival Museum — or on a riverboat, or in a haunted inn on Halloween weekend — is the kind of uniquely Mobile night out that residents like to boast about to visitors. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. on August 13; the question on every guest list is who will still be standing when the reveal comes at the end of the third course.