Review: No Time To Kill (Mysteriously Yours)

Mysteriously Yours Dinner Theatre presents a new murder-mystery play at Toronto’s Old Mill

Clockwork background with the words No Time To Kill on it.Dinner theatre is about pure entertainment. You, and at least one other friend since dinner theatre isn’t really a solo activity, plan to have a lovely evening out with some food, a few drinks, and some laughs. Mysteriously Yours’ No Time To Kill does a great job in providing you exactly what you’re asking for in dinner theatre, food, laughs, and entertainment.

No Time To Kill is a shlocky, Sherlock Holmesian, interactive comedic detective production. The actors walk in and around the audience in a couple of banquet rooms with the large round tables, shout their lines at each other, and pick on particular people in the audience who are there for special events (like birthdays, or anniversaries, or whatever reason you put down when you buy your tickets). And it’s good fun, I enjoyed watching people being given pieces of dialogue to set them up to become the punch line for a lot of jokes.

That said, if you’re not one of the people who is called on, the beginning of the performance is kind of slow. You watch as the cast goes from table to table, saying hello to people but particularly looking for the individuals that they need to get ready for their bits of the show. It’s not the worst thing, but it does take some time so be prepared for that to drag a bit.

This drag made me feel like I wasn’t going to enjoy the show at all. The first few jokes made me roll my eyes and look at my partner and wonder what was going on. However, when the show gets rolling, it’s a fun time with quite a few entertaining gags and performances.  The premise of the play is that there is a doctor who may have invented time travelling and you are there to watch the murder unfold. There’s not a lot in the way of action, pretty much all of the information is passed on through the dialogue, but there are some stand out moments. There’s a running joke that Simon Elser’s Sherlock Holmes has that made me laugh out loud a few times, and there are some great moments when Elser reminds the audience that they’re in a murder mystery. Michelle Regal is hilarious as the overly drunk Lady Chelsea happily draping herself around all the tables and drawling her way through her lines as if she was the most important person in the room.  Also Thomas Ketchum was perhaps the one who interacted with our table the best with his earnest naive version of H.G. Wells.

Like any interactive media, the more you put into it the more you get out of it. That means you hope that the people who are having their birthday want to play along. When we went, we had a couple of great people who dove right in and added lines that the actors weren’t expecting, or provided more to the scene and they were some of the best and brightest moments that made me laugh the loudest. There was the fun in trying to figure out who had committed the crime, since that’s part of the evening’s entertainment. Which just points out that if you aren’t engaged, that part isn’t going to be as fun too.

That means, when you’re watching No Time To Kill, you have to let go and say OOOOOOOOH, and AHHHHHHHH to make sure you get the most out of it.

Details:

  • No Time To Kill is playing at the Chelsea Hotel Downtown (33 Gerrard Street) and The Old Mill Inn (9 Old Mill Road) until January 26th
  • Shows run on Saturday at 6:30pm (Show starts at 7:30pm) @ the Chelsea and Wednesday at 11:30am (Show starts at 12:30pm) @ The Old Mill, but check their calendar for specific dates and times.
  • Tickets for dinner and a show are $119 for Saturday, $69 for lunch and a show on Wednesday, and $37 for just the show on Wednesday
  • Tickets can be purchased online through the Mysteriously Yours website.

Promotional poster provided by Mysteriously Yours.