Moonlight Murder

Tonight on the program at the Hollywood Bowl: murder! A bravura production of Verdi’s Il Trovatore is the setting for this con brio blend of music, mystery and murder most foul. Leo Carrillo portrays Gino D’Acosta, a brilliant tenor who has millions of die-hard fans and at least one die-now enemy. Warned of impending doom by a mystic, Gino laughs it off – until he performs an aria, then perishes - the victim of poisoning - in front of 20,000 wildly applauding witnesses. Whodunit? An L.A. cop (Chester Morris) has a long cast of suspects: the mystic, a deranged composer, an ambitious understudy, the cuckolded opera conductor, Gino’s cast-off mistress, Gino’s latest sweetheart and the sweetheart’s former beau (Duncan Renaldo, who would play Cisco to Carrillo’s Pancho in The Cisco Kid TV series and several films). The plot thickens when one of the suspects is the next to die. Can you spot the killer before he – or she – strikes again?