‘Foul Play’ Interactive Series Mixes Murder, Broadway Stars

The new interactive online series Foul Play came, as often has happened the past couple of years, from a bored creative mind whiling away the hours of the pandemic lockdown, trying to come up with a way to tell stories that didn’t rely on traditional ways of staging those stories.

The result this time is a new kind of interactive experience, a string of original murder mysteries in the tradition of Agatha Christie, shot with a large cast of improvisatory actors on a dozen cameras simultaneously in four connected rooms. Though the episodes are recorded and will be available for multiple viewings afterward, a “live” component during each episode’s initial debut is designed to add urgency to online sleuths trying to solve the case.

“The point wasn’t to make a technology that didn’t exist before,” said creator and star Andrew Barth Feldman, best known for his work on Disney+ show High School Musical: The Musical: The Series and in Broadway musicals such as Dear Evan Hansen. “The point was how do we make a digital murder mystery.”

And it’s not Feldman’s first involvement with a different kind of storytelling. During the lockdown, he was part of Ratatouille the TikTok Musical, a benefit online concert inspired by a TikTok meme that in turn was based on the hit Pixar animated movie.

The 20-year-old Feldman has been a fan of murder mysteries since he was a child growing up in suburban Manhasset, New York. He’s hosted gatherings for a decade built around mail-order murder mystery parties, including some with fellow Evan Hansen cast members before and just after the pandemic hit.

Feldman and Evan Hansen co-star Alex Boniello also collaborated on a string of fundraisers for actor charities that streamed on Twitch featuring stars playing the online party-game package Jackbox.

Boniello was also part of Broadway Whodunit, an initial effort by Feldman to use Zoom, Vimeo, and other online tools early in the pandemic to tell several mystery tales. Ultimately, the pair decided to adapt those stories to a somewhat different approach that wasn’t hamstrung by the limits of the conferencing software.

The result was the five episodes of Foul Play, which were shot over a couple of weeks on highly stylized interconnected sets built for different setups such as a mansion party, a 1940s film noir, a Dungeons & Dragons gathering, a reality TV show, and a boy band.

Feldman and Boniello worked with a Ukrainian technology company, Sigma Software, to create the software needed for the experience to run online with all the evidence, cameras and conversations simultaneously available. Their project was backed by $1 million in funding from TBD Theatricals, a prominent Broadway producer.

“It’s a strange sort of movie/(full-motion-video) video game/kind of board game thing,” Boniello said. “This platform just didn’t straight up exist.”

Performers, many of them Broadway, film and TV veterans, were given wide latitude to improvise their parts during the filming, as long as they mentioned specific story “beats” along the way that would be crucial clues.

But not even the actor playing the murderer was told of their “guilt” until partway through the shooting, after the murder itself happens, so they wouldn’t inadvertently give away anything in the shows’ early acts, Feldman said.

Cast members include some notables: Stranger Things’ Gaten Matarazzo, Michael Urie (Shrinking), Ryan Haddad (The Politician), Rob McClure (Mrs. Doubtfire), Erica Hernandez (Bridge and Tunnel), Will Roland (Billions), Celia Rose Gooding (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds), and Alex Brightman (School of Rock).

As the episodes unspool over the next few weeks, each debut will be accompanied by a live Discord server conversation with Feldman, Boniello and others. The first 20 audience members who solve each mystery on the Discord conversation will be rewarded with additional behind-the-scenes and other content related to the project.

“I referred to myself as a gardener, planting so many seeds, because we didn’t have any other kind of outlet,” said Boniello. “The primary way we understood to tell stories and make money was taken from us (by the pandemic). It’s so wild that three years on, we’re starting to see every seed start to take off. That’s a very flowery way to put it.”

Foul Play indeed is a very different approach to telling a tale. Audiences can click between rooms and cameras to overhear conversations as performers move in and out of them. Audiences will also have access to bits of “evidence” to help them solve the crime. But by definition, they’ll do so with

Foul Play arrives in an era of revived audience love for the classic “everybody in the room” style of murder mysteries first made popular by Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, and similar works.

Hulu has a critical and fan favorite with the Emmy-nominated Only Murders in the Building. Writer/director Rian Johnson and star Daniel Craig had a massive theatrical hit with 2019’s feature Knives Out, featuring Craig’s drawling detective Benoit Blanc. It grossed nearly $319 million worldwide.

Netflix
NFLX
then paid Johnson and Craig $500 million for the rights to two sequels, the first of which, Glass Onion, was one of the streaming service’s most-watched hits when it debuted around Christmas.

Feldman’s next project is a notable one, starring opposite Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence in the indie comedy No Hard Feelings, debuting in June.

Access to Foul Play is $9.99 per episode, or $39.99 for the five. Below is a trailer for the series: