Jessica Fletcher solves murders the way others run errands. Now audiences can try to keep up.
In Cabot Cove, Maine, the kindly, wide-eyed retired schoolteacher doubles as a wildly successful mystery author who rarely hesitates to step under police tape and into an investigation. That’s a boon for the fictional town with a disproportionate number of both murders and hapless law officers.
Now the lovable accidental sleuth Jessica Fletcher is played by someone other than the priceless Angela Lansbury. In “Solve-Along-A-Murder-She-Wrote,” which tours to the Great Star Theater in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Australian performer Tim Benzie dons a graying blond bird’s nest of a wig to lead audiences through an interactive screening of “A Fashionable Way to Die,” the first episode in the fourth season of the long-running TV detective drama series. The task: Crack the case before Jessica Fletcher does.
Among Benzie’s tools are a “fameometer” and a “suspiciometer.” Audiences get to wave “suspicion paddles.”
Fans of murder mysteries, 1980s and ’90s nostalgia and Lansbury’s peerless range and comic timing should start click-clacking on their metaphorical typewriters.