In the board game canon, Clue occupies a rather interesting space.

Whereas Monopoly is about dominating your friends and family through cutthroat business savvy or Battleship is about beating your snot-nosed brat of a sibling through graphing; Clue aims to put the players at the center of a story.

That story being a locked room mystery, not unlike Agatha Christe’s And Then There Were None.

More than anything Clue seeks to embody a whole genre of storytelling, just in boardgame form. So its unsurprising that Clue is also probably the most adaptable board game there is.

Its easier to translate it to the stage or screen because it already has a cliched plot, you just need to fill in the blanks.

And so, Clue: The Musical, the latest stage production of the Strauss Theater Center, aims to, quite literally, bring the board game to life with song and dance.

Which it does quite well, while making itself different from that other Clue adaptation.

One might expect The Musical to be the already great Tim Curry movie, but with singing; however, that is hardly the case.

Instead of a multiending period comedy using the set up and character names, as the movie Clue did; Clue: The Musical is the boardgame, dice, cards, and all.

The audience is asked to try and slove the murder as the play unfolds.

In the first half we meet our cast and learn their backstories, their connections to Mr. Body, and their motivations for possibly killing him. All the while the audience is given clues to help them figure out who, where, and how they done it.

The second half picks up after Mr. Body’s death, and follows a new character, The Detective, as they try to piece together the mystery and deliver the obligatory climactic accusation.

While all variations of Clue may share the basic premise of And Then There Were None they all lack the depth of it, but that’s to Clue’s advantage.

It ditches complex mystery for brainteasing fun and loads of humor, which Clue: The Musical does well. Honestly that’s where it shines the most, being just down right funny.

Of course good script writing is meaningless without a good cast and crew, and the cast of Clue: The Musical is a great one.

As is the crew. They managed to bring out the humor in an already funny play, and truely brought Clue to life.