On the surface, a recent rehearsal for “Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express” at Mount Holyoke College’s Kendall Sports & Dance Center in the Studio Theatre seemed standard. Actors in jeans and tennis shoes ran through the show’s first act, in which detective Hercule Poirot, played by Sam Samuels, has to solve a murder while onboard a train stuck in a snowstorm. In the absence of set pieces, they moved black boxes representing furniture. A plastic snap-lid container stood in for a lady’s hatbox. Despite a few typical rehearsal hiccups — a curtain closed a second too early; an actor called for line — everything was running smoothly overall.
It was much like any other run-through for a show still two weeks away from opening night, but it carried additional weight. This production marks the official return of the summer theater program at the college after a 25-year hiatus. The season returns with a two-show lineup: “Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express,” which runs through Saturday, July 11, and “The 39 Steps,” which runs from Friday, July 17, through Saturday, July 25.
The program began in 1970. Noah Tuleja, the current artistic director of the program and director of “Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express,” worked as an apprentice there in 1987, back when the shows — eight per season for adults and two or three for kids each summer — were held in the round in a big orange-and-white tent outdoors.
“Everybody has a summer theater story,” Tuleja said. “Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, I used to go there all the time. I loved to bring my kids to this.’ … I could feel that there was a hunger for it to come back, but I wasn’t positive, so this season, I really wanted to present it in a way to see if I was right about that from an audience perspective.”
When he returned in 2014 to Mount Holyoke, where he’s now the chair of the Film Media Theater Department, he thought, “Oh, wouldn’t it be nice to bring that back one day?” He didn’t give details about why the program disappeared for as long as it did — noting it’s “a pretty long answer that’s not really my answer” — but it took about 12 years for him to get it up and running again.
“It was such an important part of my life as a theater professional, and so I wanted to bring back that same kind of experience for younger actors and designers and technicians — a chance to practice their craft before they go out into the big, bad world,” he said.
Sam Samuels, who plays Hercule Poirot, also worked as an apprentice in the program. He began in 1978 and was “captivated,” he said, returning for four more seasons after that and eventually becoming a member of the acting company. The other actors and directors he worked with there, he noted, were “real role model figures for me,” so coming back to the program now feels “kind of like a homecoming, only everybody moved the furniture around while I was away.”
Tuleja and Samuels met at New Century Theatre in 2014, and this is now their fifth time working together. In two of the three shows they’ve both performed in, they played characters in a duo.
Now, Samuels said, “We have kind of a shorthand. We know each others’ rhythms at this point. … Sometimes, half the rehearsal is getting comfortable with other people, and that work was already done years ago.”
Tuleja said he knew Samuels would be right to play Hercule Poirot in part because he thought Samuels “would be a really good role model for everybody in that space, because his work ethic is pretty much second to none. You want the person who’s leading the ship in some way — or the train — to be somebody that the younger actors can look up to and be like, ‘Yes, that’s the type of actor I should be.’”
Samuels understood the role would be a sizable one; as he told Tuleja, “This script has dried out two yellow highlighters for me — and, subsequently, my brain.” Still, he was already a lifelong Agatha Christie fan and was ready for the challenge.
“I know there have been dozens of the best English-speaking actors in the world who have played this part — and I have done my best to forget about all of them,” Samuels said with a laugh, “because I am in no way David Suchet or Kenneth Branagh or Albert Finney or even Charles Lawton, who played it on stage, so I’ve had to put all that aside and just think, ‘What would I be like if I were a Belgian guy who had these quirks and tics and curiosities?’”
The show involves a variety of accents besides Belgian — namely, Italian, Scottish, English, Hungarian, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, French and American. Tuleja brought in voice coach Hank McDaniel to help the cast with their characters’ accents. Samuels was also able to draw on accent work he’d done in his college acting program, as well as his childhood growing up with a Polish mother and Russian grandfather. Before that, he’d learned French in high school and visited the country as well.
“Sometimes, with dialect work, there might be certain words that can get you back on track,” he said, “like if you are getting lost and you’re starting to wander into an Italian [accent], just mentally say the word ‘monsieur,’ and suddenly you’re back in France.”
Tuleja doesn’t yet know if the program will be able to return after this summer — it’s dependent on audience responses and Mount Holyoke, he said, but he’s confident that he and his team will have a good product to show for their work.
“We’re gonna put on the best shows that we can, we have really good casts, we have really good designers, we have really good people working. … I think the product’s gonna be really high-quality,” he said. “I think as long as we do that, then if we get enough people there, I think there will be an appetite for it to come back.”
Tickets to each show are $15, and season tickets to both shows are $25 via mhcsummertheatre.ludus.com.
