NATIONAL POST Reviews

Mysteriously Yours... Mystery Dinner Theatre, Toronto
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TORONTO - Nostalgiacs, rejoice: Rick's Café in Casablanca is still open for business. This is thanks to the people at Mysteriously Yours, whose Murder in Casablanca is their best show to date. One of the characteristics that is most Mysteriously Theirs is that, in all the 60 years since the release of the totemic movie, neither the Café nor Rick himself appears to have aged a day.

Some things of course have changed. Back in the Second World War Casablanca, ruled by Vichy France, was a jumping-off post for anti-Nazis desperate to escape to neutral Lisbon. These days it's a haven for environmentalists, all of whom naturally crave entry to Canada. But terror still stalks the streets of Morocco, and human life is cheap: Cheaper if anything, since even the Chief of Police, whom one would formerly have tagged as a consummate survivor, is no longer immune. At an early stage of the proceedings the body of this Captain Renault, still in his old job and still the suavest of the suave ("The plane to Newfoundland, Rick. You'd like to be on it?") is discovered lifeless in the alley, obviously offed. The rest of the cast must decide who was in the offing. As is standard procedure at Mysteriously Yours, they enlist -- or maybe that should be extort -- the assistance of the audience in finding out.

First we eat, rather well; and from a menu appropriate to the locale. (I mean it includes couscous.) Next, actors move among us, sitting down at our tables and confiding personal information, such as why their characters hate all the other characters. This is good strategy: Motive before mayhem. Then the entertainment proper begins, and Jean Daigle -- director, co-author (with Brian Caws) and star -- takes command.

Usually Daigle appears in these shows as a guttural detective calling himself Hercule Parrot. This time, though, he appears as Rick, himself. The show is the better for the change. The Agatha Christie interrogation set-up still remains, in cockeyed counterpoint to a story from another tradition altogether. Meanwhile the movie Casablanca's mythological status makes it an especially fertile source for slapstick pastiche, and it's good to see the maestro moving right in there and getting his hands dirty.

Now Daigle is not exactly the reincarnation of Humphrey Bogart. This Rick may not, as I said, have grown a day older but he has unquestionably become shorter and fatter. Vocally, too, he is more aggressively hard-boiled than the elegantly laconic Bogie ever was. The character he really suggests is Tony Soprano, or at least Tony as he might have sounded had James Gandolfini been passed over in favour of Bob Hoskins. (The Sopranos, incidentally, must be high on the list of future targets for Mysteriously Yours -- it would certainly present a stimulating challenge to both cast and kitchen.) With a murder, and the love of his life, dropped on his doorstep simultaneously, Daigle shows us perplexity about to explode. He has to take it out on someone, so he takes it out on us. The audience at these plays always gets balloted on the killer's identity; a permanent attraction is the scorn that Daigle invariably pours on those of us who guessed wrong.

The other actors conspire to take the action and characters of Casablanca to a new level. They draw out tendencies that the original authors may never have known they had. Along with a cop called Renault, the screenplay has made the show a present of a gangster named Ferrari. They take this coincidence (if that's what it is) and run, or rather drive, with it. We meet the incorruptible conservationist Victor Volvo (a performance by Brian Smith of virtuoso upstandingness), and his wife (Birgitte Solem, white-sheathed and demurely provocative), known to film-buffs as Ilsa Lund but here logically if somewhat laboriously revealed as Ilsa Lund-Rover. She of course is Rick's old Scandinavian flame, with whom he once shared an unforgettable time in the most romantic of cities. ("Whatever happens, we will always have Nantucket.")

Rick also has a newer, jealous flame, a role much expanded from the movie. There, she was the one who hooked up with a German, provoking from Renault the comment "In her own way, she may constitute an entire second front." She was called Yvonne then. Now, of course, she is called Mercedes. Rick is tiring of her, maybe because she calls him Wick. (She does this because she has a lisp.) Mercedes is a singer, and she, or someone, knows the score. You expect to hear the inevitable As Time Goes By, but not perhaps the less-remembered Knock on Wood, delivered by Mercedes with all-purpose chic and some surprising new lyrics. ("Who's got cellulite? We've got cellulite.") She doesn't do requests, or I might have been tempted to ask for The Lady is a Twamp, or better still Widin' Awound in the Wain. She is played by Barb Scheffler, incomparably.

Blaine Parker weighs in, at several stone, as Ferrari who smokes a villainous cigar (down these green streets a man must go). Gregg Taylor plays Renault and also, so he won't just lie around all evening, a cringing spy named Bugatti, in which role he manages a truly electrifying Peter Lorre impersonation: much the evening's best feat of mimicry. Spectators fulfill their assigned roles with gallantry and, in a few cases, cheek. At my visit three young people, seated not far from me, were pressed into service to play a camel and I thought they were excellent. I greatly admired the snap of the dialogue, and the unfazed alacrity of the ad-libs; I wonder if dinner-theatres are eligible for Doras. I came to Casablanca for the laughs and the eats. I was well-informed.

Indefinite run. Box office: 416-486-7469.