The final stop on our NYC murder mystery tour is Murdered by the Mob, which is advertised as an off-Broadway murder mystery show, complete with a three course dinner and dancing. Sadly, Mackenzie couldn’t make it to the final round, so it was just Jeremy and I experiencing this one!

We went online to purchase tickets and chose to get $99 general admission. The VIP tickets come with reserved VIP seating, but we decided to stick with the cheaper option because let's be honest, even the cheaper option isn’t cheap… especially when they slap on a $15 service fee when you purchase them. In my mind, we were not off to the best start.

The downstairs area of Arno Restaurant in NYC is the home of these shows, which is a very nice Italian restaurant. We were excited, because we had heard nothing but good things about this place, and thought it would be an awesome venue for a performance like this! That said, we were a little disappointed that we only had two choices of meals (chicken parm or pasta) because we were both looking forward to some delicious Italian choices. The food was good, though. I just think for over $100 per ticket, we should have a little more freedom to choose what we want to eat. Dessert was disappointing; everyone got one cookie that looked like something I could buy at the grocery store.

The story is obviously mob themed, which Jeremy was super excited about. It’s about a party to celebrate the new Don, where something goes wrong and now there’s a murder mystery to solve. Strangely enough, as much as Mackenzie and I had been craving the interactivity of the murder mystery show in our imaginations, the interactivity in this one sort of missed the mark for us. It was almost as if the show was relying on the audience members brought up to speak to do something silly to give the actors something to talk about or riff off of, which made it seem like there wasn’t a lot of actual substance to the story, and what was there was heavily supplemented by the audience interaction. The actors were great, though, so I was disappointed that we didn’t actually get to see them act much. We couldn’t have guessed the ending no matter how hard we tried, because it didn’t make sense.

We had a nice enough time at this performance, due to the beautiful restaurant, decent food, and good actors, but the tickets are super expensive, and the audience interaction is a bit too overpowering and not utilized very well. Overall, this isn’t my favorite murder mystery show in NYC, but it’s been running so long that it’s pretty much an NYC staple, and it’s a fun time if you’re willing to shell out a whole lot of moolah.