Time stamp: Saturday, January 24th, 5:37 p.m. EST. We’d not yet gone fully antarctic.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: on too-rare occasion we’ll spend time out of the house with other Gen-X adults who aren’t related to us, and not just fellow geek strangers in comic-con lines, like that one morning when we learned “high tea” was a thing outside Victorian England and tried some in an elegant Beech Grove parlor.

Saturday night we tagged along with two of our tea-time companions for food ‘n’ art at Beef & Boards Dinner Theatre, an Indianapolis institution for live stage performance since 1973. My wife Anne and I were born, raised, and largely content here in Indy all life long, but neither of us had braked for Beef & Boards before. The four of us made plans months in advance and stuck to them, even when local and national news warned us The Snowstorm of the Century had been scheduled for this very same weekend. The theater understandably canceled their Sunday performances, but as for Saturday, they declared the show must go on.

Spirited performances yet-to-come for 2026.

Dinner theater is an extremely uncommon experience for us in general. I do recall one 1990s Trek convention that ended with an absolutely wonderful event in which a ticketed dinner was followed by special guests Alexander Siddig and Andrew J. Robinson performing a one-act, two-man show they’d written themselves for their characters Dr. Julian Bashir and Elim Garak. So this Saturday might’ve been our second-ever night of dinner theater. It doesn’t help that in pop culture at-large, “dinner theater” tends to be treated as a pejorative, usually with a locational modifier for further diminution — “Branson dinner theater”, “nursing-home dinner theater”, other snark like that.

All roads were already snow-covered when we left the house around 5-ish. Most of the rest of Indy had stayed home, leaving I-465 entirely to us and a few other (fool?)hardy folks. I drove us carefully without stunts and got us there with ample time to relax and enjoy the dinner that comes with the tickets — dual buffet lines serving lovingly home-cooked fare, including multiple meats and veggies (not just the eponymous Beef, but beef was in ample supply). Given my current girth, I try to avoid buffets nowadays for the same reason that alcoholics committed to recovery don’t go hang out in bars as much as they used to. Fortunately we enjoyed our company and conversation so much that the thought of a second plate never occurred to me. And we all saved room for sundaes later, served during intermission.

We’d fretted a bit about the dress code, which we hadn’t thought to look up until, um, around 4:45 Saturday. We absentminded planners were a tad chagrined to find their site proclaimed a preference for “business casual”. I had a few items to mix-‘n’-match, but Anne has been working at home full-time for years and scrambled to cobble an outfit together from some options that rarely come in handy and were buried under her everyday comfy togs. We felt presentable enough — at the very least, we’d gotten ourselves to school field-trip code — but did note that the B&B fashion police weren’t turning anyone away at the door. One gent across the room showed up in jeans, T-shirt and cowboy hat. We didn’t earn a single brownie point for our last-minute efforts.

Our souvenir program.

Our feature presentation was Agatha Christie’s 1952 play The Mousetrap. The irony wasn’t lost on a single audience member that we were about to see a tale about a group of travelers who find themselves snowed in for an evening together in one cozy place. We walked into it knowing virtually nothing about it, though we’d forgotten that the same play was integral to the plot of the forgotten 2022 meta-whodunit gem See How They Run with Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan, which takes place on the occasion of the original run’s 100th West End performance (whose cast included the Richard Attenborough). The film welcomes Christie and her husband as characters in its final act, and hadn’t contained any Mousetrap spoilers, far as we could remember. We weren’t even sure which character here was supposed to be in charge of solving the mystery.

The Mousetrap features eight characters and an unseen radio newsman who sounded a lot like George Sanders. The program listed the extensive stage credits for each actor, which I’m archiving here for my own future reference, because who knows if they might cross our paths again:

• Malia Munley and Jae Woo as a young married couple who’ve just opened a guesthouse out in the English sticks
• Jonathan Cobrda (star of B&B’s 2025 production of Tootsie) as Christopher Wren, a would-be architect who practically won’t stop bouncing off the walls and furniture
• Longtime Beef & Boards player Suzanne Stark (40+ years’ worth of roles and counting!) as fussy widow Mrs. Boyle
• Jeff Stockberger (B&B’s most recent Ebenezer Scrooge) as stiff-upper-lipped retiree Major Metcalf
• Hannah Embree as the tomboyish enigma Miss Casewell
• Adam du Plessis as the seemingly Eastern European, rather jocular Mr. Paravicini, who keeps elbowing the fourth wall
• Scot Greenwell as Detective Sgt. Trotter, the requisite interrogator

Cast member and assistant stage manager Jeff Stockberger introduced the play, with the customary request that the audience not go forth and spoil it for others.

Obviously we couldn’t take photos during the performance, which we wouldn’t have dreamed of doing anyway. Through two acts plus an intermission, we remained engrossed and stumped. I didn’t see the ending coming, despite ignoring one red flag that had me thinking, “How did that character know that?” but I just assumed I’d forgotten some earlier dialogue and the lapse was mine, not the character’s. Now that we know, I realized I’ve seen past TV mysteries employ similar solutions. Next time a show does it, I’ll have a frame of reference to judge them more scornfully.

The show wrapped up shortly after 10 p.m., by which time the gift shop had closed, so the program was our only tangible souvenir. We found our cars unsurprisingly coated in snow, which thankfully hadn’t frozen solid yet. One vigorous brushing later, we were on our way home and had I-465 nearly all to ourselves again. Snowplows were still doing laps around town and had kept two lanes clearer than the rest, so no ill fate befell us, other than the low tire pressure light on my dashboard that I prayed was due to drastic temperature change rather than an ill-timed nail.

Come Sunday, we held our own virtual reenactment of The Mousetrap, by which I mean we stayed home and didn’t try going anywhere due to impassable roads covered in at least a 10-inch snowfall. We left out the murdering.

Around 12:30 I shoveled our front walk in vain, as proven ’round 5 p.m.

…but we’re glad the blizzard had taken several hours to rev up and left us a narrow window of opportunity so we could enjoy that night of friendship, culture and temporary escape from the horrors that our phones can barely contain. We all agreed we must return to Beef & Boards in the future, preferably when it’s much warmer out and we don’t need to look for our skis.

Group photo by the nice lady at the next table.