By: Blake

I attended a dinner train theater recently in Fort Myers Florida and have found that it can make for a fun experience. If you aren’t familiar with this type of theater I’ll explain. It is a train ride, you eat dinner and enjoy a murder mystery play that happens on the train while you eat. The play that we saw was called “Murder Quite Undiplomatic”. It was a murder mystery that happened while we were aboard the train. The actors would go from car to car performing each act and it was the passenger’s job to pick up on clues to who the killer is. All aboard!

The particular train we were on was built in the 1930s. It was cool to know that the train, or at least the cars, was around during before the beginning of the cold war, which was the setting of the play. As we boarded the train we found our seats and a fruit and cracker platter already on our table which started our five course meal. As the train began to move the actors came into our car and began the play. The first actor we saw Mad Dog Malarkey, a fighter pilot who probably shouldn’t have been a pilot. He seemed to get more and more crazy as the play went on; he would talk about shooting gremlins off of the wings of his plane with his sidearm and he would accuse everyone of being a spy, even the waitresses.

Probably the craziest character was Cheng Mai-Lee, an Irish Chinese woman who was married to an exiled Chinese ambassador. She was born Irish, but Chinese by marriage and by choice as she put it. Although she tried she wasn’t very good at being Chinese. She would always say “As we say in my country, domo arigato…”, which is Japanese.

Image courtesy of the Seminole Gulf Railway

The play was full of comedy and was quite entertaining to watch while we ate. The main course included your choice of either prime rib, salmon, or chicken and was followed by an apple cobbler desert. In the end I was able to guess who the killer was… you’ll have to make your own guess when you go. Overall we had a great time and would recommend attending a Dinner Train Theater for a unique kind of entertainment.