Continuing on it’s journey from the McCarter Theatre production in 2017, Murder on the Orient Express comes to Hartford Stage. Tickets and details can be found at HartfordStage.org

A snippet from Connecticut Magazine:

Man of Mystery

You could say Ken Ludwig has a thing about mysteries. After all, last fall his play The Game’s Afoot — centering on a murder at the castle-like Connecticut home of Sherlock Holmes actor William Gillette — played the Ivoryton Playhouse. This spring he returns to Holmesian turf with Baskerville at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre. But next up is his stage adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, which runs Feb. 15-March 18 at Hartford Stage. It’s the McCarter Theatre production from Princeton, New Jersey.

I asked the prolific Ludwig what drew him to the genre, especially after his string of popular comedies including Lend Me a Tenor.

“People love mysteries and they never go out of style,” he says, adding that Holmes and Watson are among literature’s most famous characters. “But they’re really, really hard to write and they need to be devilishly clever.”

Ludwig says the Agatha Christie estate, looking to bring more of the author’s literary work to stage, film and television, approached him for a theater adaptation of one of her mysteries. Ludwig was eager to do Murder on the Orient Express — even if there was a major motion picture remake of that title that came out last year.

“It’s glamorous, it’s romantic and just the title itself is magic,” he says. “It is a bigger play than I usually write for the stage, but I’ve been able to cut the number of suspects down.”

He says, in a contemporary world seemingly out of control, the solving of mysteries is a kind of safe escape for audiences. “It may be a nice outlet for us now, as many of us are upset about the world, to escape out of our real-world problems for a couple of hours and then see justice done. And it’s the sense of justice — versus the rule of law — that is at the heart of Murder on the Orient Express.”

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