Magic Circle Mime Co. performs a show called "Death on the Downbeat" with the Oregon Symphony orchestra. The show is a film noir-themed murder mystery where the conductor is mysteriously killed during rehearsal. Doug MacIntyre and Maggie Petersen founded Magic Circle Mime Co. based on a shared interest in miming and music. They develop shows by choosing music pieces and spinning stories around them. For "Death on the Downbeat" they were asked to create a New Year's Eve program and came up with the idea of a murder mystery concert where the audience helps solve the crime during the performance.

1. Conductor Gundar Bigherr has kicked the bucket, and
we are suspects! Magic Circle Mime Co.’s Death on the
Downbeat treats audiences to a film noir-themed whodunit
accompanied by the Oregon Symphony orchestra.
Premiered in Chicago in 1993, this show, which “came
later in the progression of things” for the company, is off
the beaten path of its many mime acts.
Doug MacIntyre and Maggie Petersen founded Magic
Circle Mime Co. based on a shared interest in miming and
their musical backgrounds. They began with performances
geared toward educating audiences, mainly younger
ones, about classical music, but their work grew into
something bigger—something MacIntyre repeatedly called
“serendipitous.” And since the duo “cannot speak in many
languages,” they mime to provide visual interpretations that
enhance the musical pieces played by the orchestras they
work with. Knowing that classical music has great story-
telling depth and that miming is a universal language, the
duo exposes audiences to classical music with a theatrical
touch.
I spoke with MacIntyre about Magic Circle Mime Co.’s
origins and how he and Petersen brought Death on the
Downbeat into their repertoire.
InSymphony: How did Magic Circle Mime Co. come together?
DougMacIntyre:IwishIcouldsayitwassomegreat,overwhelming
vision that we had, but it was just something that started off as a
lucky break and we kind of capitalized on that and then got an
opportunity to try it again. Word spread a little bit, and then we got
some really great assistance from some conductors we worked with
and administrators; it kind of evolved to the point that Maggie and
I looked at each other and went,“Wow, this is more than just a job.
This seems to be evolving into a career.” Once we started to do it,
it was just so much fun to be up there with such great musicians
playing such great music.
InSymphony: What is your process in developing shows?
DM: We have nine shows we keep in our repertoire. Each one
has come into being in a slightly different way. Sometimes it will
be a piece of music that we react to that we want to work with,
and we spin the story around that. When it comes to Death on the
Downbeat, we actually wrote that show as a favor to a conductor
who had done a lot of work for us, and at the time he was the
resident conductor of the Chicago Symphony. He always did their
Doug MacIntyre of Magic
Circle Mime Co. on Death on
the Downbeat’s mysteriously
murdered maestro.
New Year’s Eve concerts, and they asked him if he would do it one
last time before he left, and he said,“I’ll do it, but I don’t want to do
another Vienna Waltz New Year’s Eve. Let’s ask Doug and Maggie
at Magic Circle if they can come up with an idea for us.” So, Ken
called us. I don’t know exactly how we came up with it, but we just
decided that a live murder mystery concert, kind of in the…I am
going to blank on her name—the great English mystery writer…
InSymphony: Agatha Christie?
DM: Yes, Agatha Christie. So we thought, how great that we have
a concert and everybody’s there and we have this evil conductor
that has been murdered during rehearsal. So, we’re just going to go
ahead with the concert and figure out who did it during the course
of the concert. It was one of those shows that once we came up
with it, it wrote itself, probably as fast as any show we ever created.
InSymphony: Are mysteries a favorite of yours?
DM: You know, I’ve read some. I really do like mysteries. And
it just felt like a really nice fit for an orchestra, especially when
we were able to tie it in with the idea of film noir music. All of
By Samantha Edington
Magic Circle Mime Co. performs
April 18, 2015.
ADeadly
Duo

2. 12 | oregon symphony
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{}Q & A
the music that we do in this program
has some kind of tie into crime or
mystery—some more directly than
others. Film noir just fits so perfectly
with the idea of a mystery, and truly,
it’s such an experience to hear some of
these pieces played live because most
of us have only heard them through the
little speakers on our TV sets.
InSymphony: How did you prepare
for Death on the Downbeat?
DM: Well, we listened to lots and lots of
music. When you’re creating a concert,
even if it’s a theater piece, Maggie and
I kind of take it as a rule that you have
to just be able to listen to the music
without any theater going on and it has
to sound like a concert.
It has to work theatrically as the
flow of the story goes along; you want
the music to reflect the mood of the
theater piece. One of the things when
you are working with film music is [that]
you can tell when you’re hearing film
music—and especially that era, when
you think of Casa Blanca, that big kind
of bold, curtain-raising sound they have.
You just can’t play one after another of
those, so we mixed regular repertoire in
with film repertoire so that the whole
thing has the flow of a concert. Well, we
start with the Candide overture, which
actually came about in a funny way. As I
said, we wrote this show for Chicago and
for a friend there, and a few weeks later
he called us back once we’d come up with
the murder mystery idea, and he said,
“I got a problem. The orchestra had an
auction, and a doctor in Los Angeles paid
$10,000 for the opportunity to conduct
the Chicago Symphony, and [I said] he
could do it on the New Year’s Eve concert.
But if that’s not going work, I’ll tell him
we have to find another concert.” Maggie
and I said, “No, let us think about it.”
And he wanted to conduct the Candide
overture, so we called him back and said
he could conduct the first piece on the
program,but then we’re going to kill him.
We try to make everybody seem
guilty. People in the audience, people
in the orchestra. We’re trying to get
everybody as a suspect. Since we’re
using Casablanca, which has the French
national anthem in it, we made sure
to have a French detective. We like to
describe my character as a combination
of Clouseau [from Pink Panther] and...
our police sergeant. At the time we
wrote this show in Chicago, he was an
actor that both Maggie and I had worked
with in some Shakespeare production.
You couldn’t find a more perfect police
sergeant. Whenever we do the show, we
find him wherever we may be and say,
“You want to do this show?”So,he will be
there again.
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