murder on the orient express book series

The more advanced age of the victim may detract slightly from the pathos of the scene, but the most striking thing here (supposedly occurring four years before the titular murder), is that director Jeff Seneca has chosen to film it in black and white and project it on the set’s back curtained wall.

Instead of a 20-month-old boy (the age of the Lindbergh child), the victim is a school-aged girl named Daisy Armstrong (played by 7th-grade actor/dancer Zoey Pham). This adaptation is a bullet train in design, beginning - out of nowhere - with a shocking echo of the kidnapping. Conan Doyle, as well as concocting comedies of his own such as “Lend Me a Tenor” and “Lend Me a Soprano.” Author of 28 plays, Ludwig made his rep adapting classics by Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson and A. The LTVB stage adaptation by Ken “Lend Me a Tenor” Ludwig was impressively commissioned by the Christie estate (especially impressive considering Ludwig is a Yank and not a Brit). Her 1934 novel, “Murder on the Orient Express,” the 10th involving Poirot, was inspired, in part, by the gruesome kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby in 1932, a real case that uncomfortably haunts this and any production. You can bet your ‘stache these are hard shoes to fill, and Chapman tries manfully, following in the steps of filmic Poirots the likes of Albert Finney (1974), TV’s David Suchet (my favorite, in a series starting in 1989) and Kenneth Branagh (first in 2017). Her characters are fortunately (or unfortunately?) accompanied by the world’s greatest detective - the famously fastidious Belgian Hercule Poirot (here Robin Chapman, a veteran of 40 community productions). It’s a journey their creator Agatha Christie, one of the most popular detective fiction writers of all time, made several times.

In a play chock full of superlatives, eight strangers (or are they?) board the finest, most fabulous train in the world, the Orient Express, running from Istanbul to Calais.

Murder on the orient express book series