INTERVIEW: ‘Foul Play’ is a whodunit enjoyed from the comforts of home
Photo: Foul Play features Alex Brightman, who recently starred in Broadway’s Beetlejuice. Photo courtesy of Foul Play / Provided by Vivacity Media Group with permission.
Foul Play has a lot of adjectives attached to its name: digital (because it’s played at home), immersive (because attendees are part of the action), improvised (because one doesn’t know what will happen next) and award-winning (a nod to the impressive cast and creative team who have brought this unique vision to life). Audience members should consider their Friday nights for the next month booked because this TV-theater mashup is a true party game.
Here’s how it works … On Friday nights, virtual audience members can join Foul Play online and enjoy an interactive murder mystery. Each Friday hosts a new mystery, with a different setting and different genre, according to press notes. For example, the experience kicked off Friday, April 21 with “Murder at Vanguard Mansion,” a mystery akin to an Agatha Christie novel. Tonight, April 28, will see the premiere of “The True Real Life of Real Life People,” a comedic spin on reality television. Future episodes riff on film noir, fantasy TV and children’s TV.
Audiences can join on Friday nights and explore the different digital rooms, scoping out clues and collecting evidence. Then, they can interact with the cast and creative team on Discord for live commentary and theorizing about whodunit. If one’s schedule doesn’t allow them to enjoy the “live” feed on Friday nights, the game can be experienced at anytime during the week.
When digitally walking though these mysterious rooms, different theatrical scenes will play out for audiences. Helping bringing this vision to life is a cast of actors that includes everyone from Stranger Things and current Sweeney Todd star Gaten Matarazzo, Ugly Betty star and Broadway actor Michael Urie, Beetlejuice himself Alex Brightman and Star Trek: Strange New World’s Celia Rose Gooding, among many others. The creative team includes creators Andrew Barth Feldman, Alex Boniello and Matthew Barth Tinkelman. The director is Tyler Newhouse.
“It’s been an incredible journey to go from the joy of making the thing to the joy of sharing it with the world, so we’re very, very excited,” Newhouse said in a recent phone interview. “The project started as sort of the brainchild of Andrew Barth Feldman and Alex Boniello, who were together in Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway, and when the pandemic hit, looking to keep making stuff.”
As Newhouse tells the story, Barth Feldman used to host murder mystery parties as a child, and he wanted to continue that energy with a digital theatrical experience, letting audience members who couldn’t be in the same place at the same time get to know one another.
“So they started this thing on Zoom and found this community of people who were super into this and really loved meeting all the other fun weirdos who loved goofy murder mystery games, and they brought it to Hunter Arnold, who was a producer on Dear Evan Hansen,” the director said. “I’ve worked with Hunter for a long time, so one day my phone rang. And all of a sudden, we’re all sitting on Zoom, and Andrew and Alex were trying to explain to me what the hell they meant by an interactive murder mystery that you could follow people around from room to room like it was Sleep No More. And I was just nodding and smiling and pretending that I understood what they were saying. The rest is history.”
Newhouse went into the project with an open mind, knowing that they would be trailblazers in this digital space. In some ways, Foul Play is theatrical, and in other ways, it’s TV. The show/experience exists in its own space. For the director, he fully understood what they were trying to accomplish only when they started to build the streaming service that would eventually host Foul Play.
“We had contracted with these incredible people in Ukraine to build the streaming service that would allow you to actually play the game,” he said. “You can hear the elevator pitch for the show. You can sit down and talk about it for an hour, and you can sort of theorize what it means to be able to click around from room to room and follow people as they move through space and … follow the clues, but you don’t really understand the game side of things until you can get your hands on the steering wheel, so to speak. And so it has been for me almost a two-year process of understanding and learning the show as we made it, which is sort of terrifying in a way, but extremely exciting in another way because you’re figuring it out and solving all of these incredible, creative problems as you go through the process.”
Newhouse said he was drawn to the project because of its interactivity. He wasn’t interested in creating a static TV show that would compete with the thousands of other TV shows that are available to stream. He wanted that steering wheel given over to the audience, letting them choose the adventure and discover clues by themselves.
“Hunter was very much ready to jump into the deep end and see what happened, and I was right there with everybody,” said Newhouse, who is a filmmaker and writer at TBD Creative Media. “We really lucked out that we had an incredible creative team of not only extremely talented people, but very kind people and people who were willing to put in the time and do the homework to understand what it is that we were making. It was certainly a big challenge of explaining to the actors what exactly they were going to be getting themselves into, explaining to the camera operators what they were going to have to be doing. It was a very different beast.”
Newhouse explained some of the logistics behind the game, in order to make Foul Play as inviting as possible. For starters, if Friday nights don’t work, audiences can join at any time. However, if Friday nights are open, in the director’s mind, that’s the best time to join.
“The incentive to join and play at our ‘live premiere’ is that you can join us on Discord,” he said. “Alex and Andrew and a bunch of the cast members will be on Discord. You can jump on there. You could be talking with us in real time. When we get to the big moment at the end of the show, when we’re going through the evidence and the murderer is about to revealed, you can hop in there and see if you can beat the investigator to the punch and guess the murderer. And if you’re one of the first 20 people on the Discord to guess who the murderer is, there are a whole bunch of fun prizes and special perks that will await you. Part of what we’re really hoping to do here is build a community.”
The director added: “But if you can’t be there with us tonight or the next four or five Friday nights, you can watch on demand to your heart’s content. The beauty of the show is that when you watch an episode, when you watch a case, by the very nature of the beast, you’re only getting 25 percent of the thing because you’re only in one of four rooms at any given time, so it really is begging for you to rewatch it over and over again because you will have missed a whole bunch of really funny, goofy stuff in all the other rooms you weren’t in.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Foul Play, directed by Tyler Newhouse, is now available to stream, with the next mystery premiering tonight, April 28. Click here for more information and tickets.
