Thrills with your dinner?

Detective Parker, center, played by Isabel Heaviside performs with fellow actors Dr. Julian Freke, played by Michael Walraven, left and Lord Peter Wimsey, right, played by Paul Abbott during the murder mystery dinner theater performance put on by Entree to Murder at the Hotel La Rose. (Crista Jeremiason/PD)

Who suspected dining and crime could make a perfect pairing? Well, it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce the potential popularity of murder-mystery dinner theater.

Sometime between the salad and dessert on a recent Saturday night at the La Rose Hotel’s restaurant in Santa Rosa’s Railroad Square, diners were also served heaping helpings of motive, means and opportunity.

A six-month-old roving theater company called Entree to Murder gave its debut performance of Dorothy L. Sayers’ classic murder mystery “Whose Body?” while waiters quietly delivered plates of salmon and cheesecake, and guests formed their theories about who might have done the murderous deed.

Most of them guessed wrong, but they went home happy anyway.

“I had a lot of fun,” said one of the diners, Herb Williams of Santa Rosa, who was enlisted from the audience to don a wig and play the coroner in the show’s final scene. A prominent local political consultant, Williams had no qualms about stepping into the spotlight.
“I thought this would be a kick, a change from the normal night out,” he said.