Kari Williamson and Nate Schierman’s The Witching Hour is a murder-mystery-comedy dinner theatre about a group of witches in Salem, MA, running a magic healing retreat. When their magic begins to go haywire, the sisters—Hazel, Athena, and Lorelei, along with their niece Miranda—have to find a way to save their business. Each of the sisters has her own competing idea about how to save the business, and the disagreements lead to significant tension between them. This is compounded by romantic and interpersonal tensions as the sisters bring their romantic partners/interests into the business side of things. But when another local warlock, Phoenix Draco, is killed, it’s up to the audience to determine who dunnit, which we do by asking questions of the characters as they move between the different tables.

The Sock & Buskin production, directed by Kristi Branstetter, featured excellent performances from a great cast, which is typical of Sock & Buskin’s general quality. The sisters were played by Melissa Brannen (Hazel), Williamson (Athena), and Liz Fuhrmann (Lorelei), who worked really well together to develop a chemistry that reflected both a deep bond and clear tensions in how the business should be run and they should approach being magical as such. The trio brought to life the triangulation between Hazel’s desire to save the health center by becoming less magical, Lorelei’s militant devotion to keeping their magic at all costs, and Athena’s middle position seeking a third alternative. These tensions were balanced comedically by Sela Plummer (Miranda), whose performance as an air-headed, enthusiastic, bubbly, and positive junior witch lightened the mood at tense moments while also reminding the sisters of the stakes for being good witches.

The other characters reproduced these relationships at a secondary level, with Dan Putnam (Kyle Stanley) and Jane Warren (Stefanie Austin) aligning with Hazel, Phoenix (Eric Ziegler) aligning with Lorelei, Vincent (Brent Ottaway) aligning with Athena, and Tom Edwards (Zach Myers) aligning with Miranda. Putnam and Warren run a witch “rehabilitation” business, which teaches witches not to be magical, and it was clear from Austin’s performance that Warren is a fanatical true believer, which co-existed in uneasy tension with Stanley’s much more casual Putnam, who is moving away from his opposition to magic. Ziegler played the swaggering, self-confident, and villainous Phoenix to perfection. While Vincent was a comparatively smaller role, Ottoway did bring a kind of calming presence to the stage when he arrived to run the investigation into Phoenix’s murder. And Myers was amazing at mirroring the innocence and excitement of Miranda.

One impressive element of the performance in particular was the cast’s ability to stay in character while chatting with audience members before the show and then while we asked them questions after the murder. In particular, I tried to ask difficult questions that would trip the actors up (especially with the actors I had worked with previously), and they unfailingly responded coherently and without breaking character.

My one critique of the performance is the stage itself, which was quite small for the amount of stuff in the set and the number of people in the cast. In particular, the set typically involved some large pieces, like a check-in desk, kitchen table, and human sized cauldron. When the entire cast was onstage and all playing towards the audience, it ended up looking rather like a line up instead of an organic scene, because there simply wasn’t enough space on the stage in this venue to comfortably fit the entire cast on it.