When it comes to merging funny and fright, nobody does it better than High Stakes Productions. The team behind perennial improv favorites Clued In and Hitch*Cocktails has made audiences laugh and gasp for over a decade and, naturally, go all out for Halloween. This year, they bring the Agatha Christie-inspired Travel Can Be Murder to the UP! Comedy Club stage at Second City.
We talked with ensemble members Bri Fitzpatrick (who also serves as culture coordinator for High Stakes Productions), Grace Goze (associate artistic airector), and Laura Marsha (marketing manager) about their scariest memories from past shows and traveling via emu.
What sets Travel Can Be Murder apart from other High Stakes Productions shows?
BRI FITZPATRICK: Travel Can Be Murder is the third of our UP-run iterations with High Stakes Productions and Second City partnering to create a grandiose improvised murder mystery in the UP theater, which is their largest space. Our first one was An Invitation to Die Forbased on getting invited someplace. Our second was Where There’s a Will, There’s a Waybased on inheritance and wills. And this year it’s all about travel. The audience will supply a mode of transportation, like a hot-air balloon or a sailboat or a camel, and the cast will improvise from there. We’re very much inspired by Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, Murder on the Orient Expressand Death in the Clouds.
GRACE GOZE: This show is 90 minutes, fully improvised. Our typical Clued In show sits between 50-55 minutes, but this time we have a whole hour-and-a-half, no intermission, of a fully improvised murder mystery. So you’ll get to sit with these characters, get to know them, get to know their secrets, their relationships, and ultimately see what happens when one of them dies.
LAURA MARSH: We’re really amping up the show for Halloween as we did for the last couple of years with Second City. And that includes Halloween special weekend shows in addition to the Thursdays and Sundays that we’re going to be doing. We have a 10pm on Friday night and then a Halloween show on the 31st at 4pm. So we’re excited to get to be part of folks’ Halloween plans this year.
What specific inspiration are you taking from Agatha Christie?
BF: She does locked-room murder mysteries better than anyone; this idea that we’re all contained in the same space. Somehow, somebody has been murdered. How could this have happened, and how do we determine whodunit? And that is what is so incredible, especially about being aboard a mode of transport. When you’re all on a boat together, when you’re all on a plane together, what does it look like?
It is the most kind of thrilling form of a locked-room murder mystery, because not only do you have that kind of literal locked room, you also have the elements to contend with. So you have the air, you have the sea, you have whatever terrain you might be on, high speeds and exotic locations, and all of those really up the stakes for the murder mystery itself.
LM: And confined spaces add a lot of tension in relationships too. We’re really excited to get to play with that as well as some of the other detective work that Agatha Christie delves into, like red herrings, hidden motives, and then, like Bri was saying, being in a locked space.
Does each of you have a favorite Agatha Christie work?
BF: I most recently read Death in the Cloudsand I just love the idea of taking a look at air travel as it used to be in the 40s, and also this idea of, everybody’s just in these very close quarters, and somehow over the course of a few hours, somebody has been murdered and all of the logistics that go along with that. And Poirot’s one of my favorite detectives as well. So I always love to see him solve something.
LM: I pretty recently saw Hallowe’en Party. It was genuinely terrifying to see it and to read it. And I just think it’s so fun how you turn a page and it is like, ‘Oh, what’s gonna happen?’ And we hope to get to bring a bit of that to the stage as well, but in a fun way.
GG: My favorite one is The A.B.C. Murders. I’m a huge true crime-head, and that one leans a little bit more towards a serial killer who is trying to kill somebody with every letter of the alphabet. We’re really selling that somebody is going to die, but it could be more than one person. I always love in our shows when there’s a twist, and you think there’s only gonna be one victim and then there are two. I’m really into that kind of horror aspect, so I love those books where she dips a little bit more into that.
BF: Yeah, and I think Christie is timeless. We love using her as inspiration, and we’re all very well-versed in the Christie-verse, if you will. However, I think we’re also very much drawing on more modern murder mysteries, things like the Knives Out series. And we just have a lot of fun sort of drawing on all of those inspirations and mashing them up.
LM: We add a little Scooby-Doo in there too.
Hitch*Cocktails is not only an amazing improv show, but the team goes all out with the outfits and props. Can we expect the same from Travel Can Be Murder?
LM: You can picture luggage, picture trunks, picture hat racks and coats and gloves and all the fancy things that folks in that time would travel with and wear.
BF: I think there’s a certain opulence to travel when you go back to Agatha Christie’s era. And even if our show ends up getting set in a modern era, I think we’re still gonna lean into that opulence. So we are going to be dressed to the nines, very much leaning into kind of the whites and pastels and khakis that people might wear on safari or on a yacht. And that’s just something that is such a signature of High Stakes Productions overall, but especially when we’re in the UP theater, it’s such a beautiful and elegant space that we only heighten our beauty and our elegance.
GG: I’m really excited this year because, based off of what mode of transportation we get from the audience, that is going to restrict which exits and entrances we can use on stage. So I’m really excited to see how the lighting comes together to kind of not only make us, but the audience feel like we really are in a submarine or we are in a horse and buggy as we just did in rehearsal last week. It’s gonna be immersive in the sense that, not only are we gonna set the mood in our dress and in our props, but the staging is also going to complement whatever mode of transportation we get as well, which I think will be a unique challenge in addition to the challenge of doing a 90-minute fully improvised murder mystery.
BF: Yeah, we’ll also be incorporating things that the audience can interact with, things like our programs and our lobby environment. So I won’t give too much away, but I will just drop the hint SkyMall out there.
What’s your favorite way of getting from point A to point B, transportation-wise? It can be hypothetical.
LM: Emu—sitting side saddle on an emu.
BF: Specific, I like that. So proper. I’d have to say mine needs to involve the sea in some way. Let’s go ahead and go with a luxury sailing yacht.
GG: I love a plane. I love being in the airport. I love hanging out in the airport, and I kind of have this special talent where even as the plane is taking off, I can fall asleep immediately. I would love to be first-class. Maybe that can be my hypothetical. I’ve never done that.
LM: At least bonus legroom, right?
BF: On an international flight, lay-flat beds.
GG: Yeah. Those look so cool.
BF: Not that you need help falling asleep.
GG: I love sleeping and existing on a plane. Love that.
In the spirit of Halloween, what’s the scariest moment you’ve ever experienced in one of your shows?
BF: What I love about High Stakes shows is, we do really emphasize and lean into emotions and reactions that aren’t just laughter. So yeah, it’s always going to be very funny. It’s always going to be incredibly entertaining, but we love a gasp. We love a scream, right? There have been times onstage that I have genuinely screamed because a second murder surprised me or somebody came out of the shadows. That’s one of my favorite things about what we do, that we can get that reaction out of the audience (and) we can get that reaction out of one another as well. It’s some of the best improvisers throughout Chicago, or really throughout the nation, that are doing this. So not only are we great improvisers, we’re great actors, and we’re great at leaning into the genre. And so there are going to be some genuine chills and thrills.
LM: On Friday, in Hitch*Cocktails at the Annoyance—that one is based on (the suggestion of) a fear, and the fear was chickens. At some point during the show, people backstage started just throwing fabric or hats onto the stage as though they were chickens, like accumulating in a house. The first one landed right at my feet, and I didn’t understand what it was. And I was also very invested in the scene. I just started screaming, and it took me a second to realize, ‘Oh, it’s a hat, it’s fine, it’s fine.’ My brain couldn’t comprehend what I was looking at. But it got a genuine fright out of me.
BF: And in the world of High Stakes, it’s never just a hat.
GG: I would say that my scariest moment is that, during the show, we will have cards with all of our faces on them. And we let an audience member choose a card at random, and that person is the detective. Every time my card is in the deck and I am watching the person pick, my heart is beating a million miles per minute, because, while being the detective is a triumph and a great challenge, I am always a little bit hoping that it’s not going to be me (laughs).
My next biggest fear would be, we often have a monologist who will come out and kind of set the scene. Sometimes I come out as the monologist, and I choose an accent that I absolutely cannot maintain. And then my newest fear is, ‘Oh gosh, when I enter the next scene, will I sound like the same person I sounded like two minutes ago, or is something completely different going to come out of my mouth?’
BF: What’s cool about this run of Travel Can Be Murder is that you will get to see those moments live, in color. You will see a detective picked and you will get to see what we are all going through in those moments leading up to it. And I can guarantee you, you will see some accents. You will hear some accents, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I’m excited to see how those all transpire.
Honestly, with improvisers of your caliber, I think the bad accents are even better because they give the cast so much to play with. That’s always a blast.
BF: Oh yeah, bring on a completely butchered accent.
Travel Can Be Murder runs Thursdays (7:30pm) and Sundays (4pm) in October, as well as Friday, October 30, at 10pm and Saturday, October 31, at 4pm at Second City’s UP! Comedy Club (230 W North Ave). Tickets ($30) are on sale now.
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