Agatha’s serves up fun and food — and audiences keep eating it up

Serving up improvisational murder mysteries — and a five-course meal — since 1988, Agatha’s A Taste of Mystery has spoofed everything from Harry Potter (“Harry Plotter and the Sorcerer’s Headstone”) to “The Wizard of Oz” (“Somewhere Over the Rainbow … Someone Dies”). It’s partly a dinner theater, partly a comedy club, and audiences have been eating it up for 25 years.

In a rare remounting of a show the company first produced in 2008, the Agatha’s gang is currently taking another crack, so to speak, at the beloved Christmas ballet “The Nutcracker” in “The Nut Croaker Ballet: Murder on Your Toes” (continuing through Jan. 8).

Which begs the question: Is nothing sacred, even during the holiday season? The answer, in a word: no.

“One of the first things I learned when I started working at Agatha’s was that absolutely nothing is sacred or set in stone,” said Nevanne Hensley-Thomas, whose career there dates to 1994, when she played Blanche Boudoir in the Tennessee Williams sendup “Cat on a Hot Tin Streetcar.”

After some 10 years in the proverbial limelight, Hensley-Thomas transitioned from acting in Agatha’s shows to writing them so she could spend more nights at home with her husband and two daughters. Since then, she has penned eight scripts for the troupe.

“Even though I could write a script that stood on its own, one of the hardest things to wrap my head around in the beginning was understanding that I had to give the actors a little wiggle room, the freedom to take an active role in the collaborative process,” she said.

“It’s amazing how many great ideas come up during the rehearsals. At first, I felt like I had to bite my tongue, but once I realized how important it was to just let the actors go, the scripts ended up turning out much better than I ever would’ve imagined.”

Never mind the audience participation factor, which makes each performance of an Agatha’s show different from any other. A few members of the crowd are randomly selected before they even sit down for their hors d’ouvres. They’re handed their scenes from the script, and over the course of the evening they follow leads from the “real” actors and help solve the crime.

“It usually plays out in any number of ways,” said Ryan Girard, Agatha’s creative director since 2008. “Some people blow all of us away. Some get nervous and flub their lines. Some of them try to show off. Some of them totally freeze. It’s all good, though. You never know quite what to expect — and the real actors have to make certain adjustments accordingly — but that’s what keeps the shows fresh.”

As Hensley-Thomas put it, “It’s always a murder mystery. Somebody always dies and somebody’s always guilty. But how we get from point A to point Z changes on a nightly basis.”

The premise of “The Nut Croaker” is that the audience has arrived at the Corn Cobb Arts Center to attend a fundraising event for the Kudzu Ballet Company and to see its version of “The Peanutcracker,” a Southern spin on the classic. Their hosts for the night are Bubba and Kitty Vanderpeterbilt — one of whom is fated not to make it to the second course of the meal.

In addition to directing the show, Girard shares acting duties with Dan Triandiflou (they alternate weeks playing Bubba), alongside co-stars Emily Merkle and Amber Chaney (who also alternate weeks as Kitty). Other characters they play as the plot thickens include lead dancers Ima Bichevski and Carlos Muchomacho, and GBI agent Bulldog “Twinkletoes” Turner.

While it’s rare for Agatha’s to remount a previous show, Girard says five years is ample time to give “The Nut Croaker” a new and different appeal — for first-time members of the audience, as well as for those returning for another helping.

“‘The Nutcracker’ is an annual holiday tradition for a lot of people, just like ‘A Christmas Carol,’ ” he said, “and it’s always fun getting to play around with such iconic classics.”

Of all her Agatha’s scripts, Hensley-Thomas admits she’ll always have a soft spot for this one. She says she originally wrote it as a way to pay tribute to her late mother, Iris Hensley, who founded the Georgia Ballet Company and ran it for 45 years, until her death from cancer in 2003.

“The idea struck me like a lightning bolt at the time,” she said. “It felt like a way to salute my mother and to keep her spirit alive because I grew up around ‘The Nutcracker’ every Christmas and it was such a big part of my own family history.”

It still is, too. Her two young daughters have kept that tradition alive by performing last weekend in the Georgia Ballet’s latest production of “The Nutcracker.”