All are welcome to join us for a staging of our Spring Play, Clue, inside our Knight Fine Arts Center.

Friday, April 17 | 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, April 18 | 7:30 p.m.

Sunday, April 19 | 2 p.m.

Admission is free with open seating. Click here for the full cast list.

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There is, in theater, a kind of door that only exists for the sake of being slammed. In Clue, there are ten of them.

They open, they close, they conceal, they reveal. They are, in their way, as essential to the proceedings as any of the suspects who dart through them. In Western Reserve Academy’s spring production of Clue, these doors (along with a succession of wheeled rooms, color-coded costumes and a cast that rarely leaves the stage) form the architectural backbone of a comedy less interested in solving a murder than enjoying the absolute chaos of doing so.

For Cole Campbell ’08, directing Clue is both a homecoming and a declaration of intent. A former student of the theater program now newly installed at the helm, Campbell has chosen a show that is, above all else, a very good time. “It’s fast-paced, melodramatic, silly,” he described with the pragmatism of someone who understands that joy onstage is not incidental, it is engineered.

The play itself is a relatively recent theatrical adaptation of the beloved board-game-turned-cult-favorite 1985 film. Its premise is familiar: a group of suspiciously colorful characters, a stately mansion and a murder to be untangled at breakneck speed. But where the film relies on cinematic tricks like quick cuts, close ups, the choreography of running feet, the stage version leans into something unabashedly theatrical. “It’s all very Scooby Doo,” Campbell explained. In this world, running in place can suggest a cross-mansion chase, characters enter a new space gasping for breath having “sprinted” through winding halls and exaggeration is not just permitted but required.

And this production, notably, does not pause. There’s no intermission in this 90-minute show of continuous motion, where dialogue ricochets “like a ping pong ball,” as Campbell put it, among eight actors who must remain not just present but precise. Comedy, after all, is less about what is said than when it is said. Timing is everything and timing, like any instrument, demands rehearsal.

Campbell’s approach to this has been almost severe. Lines first (understandably so, given the density of the script) followed by movement, intention and then, finally, the small, electric surprises that make theater feel alive. By the time the cast departed for Spring Break, they had been off-book for weeks. That alone is a feat that speaks both to the demands of the production and the ambition of its director.

However, for all its structure, comedy also thrives on moments of spontaneity. In one rehearsal, Campbell described a moment where James Vacca ’26, playing the dim-witted Colonel Mustard, after being handed an envelope bearing Wadsworth’s name, made the lightning-fast decision that Mustard would not know who Wadsworth was. So he promptly offered the envelope to the wrong character, first to Peacock, then others. The cast lost it, and the bit stayed. “It’s nice to give them some ownership,” said Campbell.

Visually, the show draws heavily from its source material. Each room — the billiard room, the conservatory, the study, the kitchen — arrives as a kind of vignette wheeled onstage by a dedicated crew member and then whisked away when action demands. The effect is something like a living board game (hence the checker-board flooring), with each space a saturated burst of personality. This sensibility extends to the costumes, where Fine & Performing Arts Department Chair Carol Parker Mittal and her team of student-costume designers, have leaned unapologetically into color and character. Campbell expressed tremendous appreciation for his deeply collaborative production team, Technical Theater Director Brandon Davies and Parker Mittal chief among them, who have embraced the show’s inherent theatricality.

The result is a world that feels at once familiar and heightened. A place where Miss Scarlet does not just enter a room, but arrives; where Professor Plum’s suspicions are worn as visibly as his costume; where even the act of running becomes a character study. After all, how does one run when one is Mr. Green?

For all of the hard work demanded by this show, the cast has shown impressive stamina and a distinct yes-we-can attitude. Students have been lingering at rehearsals, even when they’re not called, content to watch the machinery of the show come together. They make each other laugh (a metric Campbell considers as reliable as any) and the production, in its many moving parts, becomes exactly what he’d hoped it might be: an invitation.

In his words, the program is rebuilding as he takes the reins of the theater department. But from this writer’s perspective, something lasting is taking shape. Not just a program, but a culture, where challenges are met with enthusiasm, where hard work is freely given, where castmates bond as intensely as any team. We can’t wait to take in Clue, where the joy at the center of it all is not in solving who did it, but in seeing how everyone on stage seems to be having so much fun figuring it out.

Break a leg, Pioneers.