INTERVIEW: Carmine’s turns into a speakeasy for new murder mystery play
Photo: Carmine’s plays host to a new production from The Murder Mystery Co. Photo courtesy of The Murder Mystery Co. / Provided with permission.
NEW YORK — Carmine’s is an institution in New York City, with two locations that are often packed with diners looking for some Italian goodness, like chicken parmigiana, penne alla vodka, meatballs and shrimp marinara. The Midtown Manhattan location, in particular, offers tourists and locals alike a chance to have that quintessential dining experience in Times Square, steps away from the Broadway marquees that light up 44th Street.
It was only a matter of time before Carmine’s got in on the theater business. The restaurant has partnered with The Murder Mystery Co., which stages private and public immersive shows around the nation, for a new dining experience built around a killer on the loose.
The upstairs of Carmine’s is turned into a 1920s speakeasy where the alcohol flows, but the police are always watchful and threatening to raid the premises. There’s a songstress belting songs next to a piano player and a roulette table where patrons can win some “money,” and lording over the proceedings is Lou Zar, who wants his guests well-fed and well-imbibed. Then all hell breaks loose when a body turns up, and the fingers start getting pointed at everyone, including the audience.
Scott Cramton is the writer of the show and the main creative force behind American Immersion Theater, which is the producer of the murder mystery, while India Palmer is the co-producer of this New York experience. Cramton said that this partnership with Carmine’s happened in the first place because The Murder Mystery Co. was featured on the successful reality series Shark Tank.
“Definitely one of the best things to come out of Shark Tank,” Cramton said in a recent phone interview. “This company was founded in 2002. We have 23 different locations. We do a tremendous amount of private shows, and then we did a lot of public shows for quite a while. We’re always looking for new venues, and Carmine’s had built this absolutely stellar space upstairs. We had just cold-called at the right time. Shark Tank helped a lot. … It helped us get to the front of the line for some of the calls there, and their owner really liked the idea of it. And I pitched him multiple times, and eventually they said, ‘Let’s give it a shot.’ So we actually wrote and built something completely custom, have original songs in it, and tried to make it like a real, true, authentic speakeasy experience with an immersive murder mystery attached.”
The action of the show takes place nightly in the upstairs space of Carmine’s. For those diners who are familiar with the Midtown location, this is not the same space where regular restaurant-goers enjoy the menu; this is a secret location that is tucked away from the public.
“What people don’t know is that the upstairs actually was not being used in Carmine’s at all,” Palmer said. “It was just a bunch of offices, so we could work to tailor it to what we wanted for our show.”
Cramton added: “This is a private event area, and even if you’ve been to Carmine’s like a 1,000 times, you might not know the space. The kitchen itself that was built for this, that got finished in August, so about 15-20 days before we actually opened. So it’s new, new. There are many, many shows you can see, but one term you don’t hear very often is ‘new space’ in Times Square. You’ve heard of new events, but it is an actual new space in Times Square. It used to just be offices.”
The folks behind The Murder Mystery Co. are champions of immersive theater, a subset of the art form that usually finds visitors walking through spaces and feeling as if they have been transported to another place or another time (sometimes even another dimension). In New York, the recently closed Sleep No More is perhaps the most well-known example of immersive theater, and Cramton and his team have been in a similar business for decades.
“Immersive theater is my entire life, and what we both wanted to come up with is something where they’re truly, truly immersed,” he said. “We have been working on this for 20 years, and this is our coup de grâce, so to speak. This is the most immersive thing we’ve ever been able to do in theater, which says a lot because we’ve been doing immersive for a long time. But the first goal, we’ve got to make it feel like a speakeasy and then feel like there’s consequences of a speakeasy, too. Not to spoil too much, but … there’s an actual raid in which people are going to turn the speakeasy over. As far as what’s scripted and what’s not, every show is somewhat different, but it’s much more immersive than most people assume.”
Cramton continued: “Most people assume you kind of watch something, and maybe it’s a little improvised. Then there’s a tiny bit of crowd interaction, and then you figure out which of these four or five people that you’re seeing on stage is the killer. But this is different. First off, members of the audience play suspects, so some of the more outgoing people, generally about one per table, actually play a suspect. And one of them could be the actual killer, so they get a full character. And we have what’s called an investigation time, which is when everybody in the entire restaurant actually gets up and mingles around and asks questions and tries to actually solve the crime.”
This murder mystery is opening up new doors for Cramton’s company. The public events that he has staged over the years are generally one- or two-night affairs, but The Murder Mystery Co. has set up shop at Carmine’s for a long run, with performances selling out and plenty of food to go around. There are many secrets embedded in the two-and-a-half-hour evening, and it’s best to keep those secret, from the food that’s served to the identity of whodunnit.
“We have the ability to actually bring out set pieces, do lighting, music cues and stuff like that,” he said. “We wanted a piano player, which we have, and we wanted a songstress, which we also have. … So basically we wanted to make it so you come in, and you feel like you’re in that amazing world of a speakeasy with everything going on.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Murder Mystery Co. is currently set up at Carmine’s on 44th Street in Midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
