Shelter Bay's Paul Fadoul directs 'The Mousetrap' in Anacortes

“The Mousetrap” is running through Saturday at the Anacortes Community Theatre and it has been selling out every show. It is a wonderful murder mystery by Agatha Christie, her first play. It opened in London’s West End in 1952 and has run successfully around the world since.

Paul Fadoul is the director. He has worked around the country in Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles and Las Vegas and has happily settled into Shelter Bay with his husband after 25 years in film and television. He first studied film and theatre at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

Fadoul moved to Los Angeles in 1986 and was a production assistant on commercials and was successful in film production and eventually owned his own production company making commercials, but he was always involved in theatre.

He moved to San Francisco in 1999 but some close friends from New York moved to Seattle so Fadoul joined them in 2001 after a detour to Las Vegas. He soon found he wasn’t loving life there. Friends had settled from Vancouver WA to Vancouver BC and he connected with a realtor in La Conner, who showed him a nice house in Shelter Bay with a dock for his boat. He bought it and he is very happy living here.

He feels very much at home in the Northwest.

At Seattle University he got a masters degree in teaching, then taught second grade and middle school theatre in Bellevue. “Theatre is life,” he said. “It is a discipline that is a microcosm of life that requires confidence, improvisation and the ability to solve problems.”

Fadoul is glad he got involved with the nearby ACT. “There is a lot of talent around here,” he said, including people from Arlington and Whidbey Island.

He is very happy with the script of “Mousetrap” and followed Christie’s every stage direction. “There was no reason that the play wouldn’t work as written so I did not screw around with that stuff,” he said. His goal as a director is to follow the author’s intent. He took feedback from his cast because he views theatre as “a collaborate art form at its best”.

When the play opened, he said he totally learned from the audience and was pleasantly surprised by their laughter. He is grateful to the cast and the crew. Everyone is a volunteer except for the person who is directing the tech and designed the lighting.

Because this is a nonprofit, they purchased everything the audience sees on stage from Goodwill and Habitat for Humanity. A couple of items had to be purchased on Craig’s List. The skis in the play were borrowed from Nasty Jack’s Antiques in La Conner.

Fadoul is also a highly accomplished chef and owns a sailboat. He learned how to sail from a Coast Guard captain. He also plays the cello, which he started in elementary school, taking lessons from third through eighth grade. He started up again at the age of 69. He is truly a renaissance man.

It is still possible to reserve tickets to the final performances of “The Mousetrap” but tickets are about gone so decide now to attend a wonderful night of theatre.

“Elf the Musical” is next up at the ACT for the holidays. It is the story of Buddy, a young orphan, who mistakenly crawls into Santa’s bag of gifts and is transported to the North Pole. The would-be elf is unaware that he is actually human. With Santa’s permission, Buddy embarks on a journey to New York City to discover his true identity.