Great Lakes Theater’s ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ a guilty pleasure Bob Abelman Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal A large part of the pleasure derived from Agatha Christie plays and the novels on which they are based is attempting to figure out for ourselves who the murderer might be based on the same clues and manipulative slight-of-hand offered to her marvelously conceived master detectives. In her “Witness for the Prosecution,” which premiered in London in 1953 and is currently being staged by Great Lakes Theater, we bear witness to the murder trial of the naïve Leonard Vole (Taha Mandviwala), who is suspected of killing Emily French, an older woman who had left him everything in her recently revised will. The key witness for the prosecution is none other than his no-nonsense, foreign-born wife, Romaine (Jodi Dominick). Because this play is based on a short story and not a novel, we are afforded fewer twists and turns and less bait and switch than other works by Christie. Instead, we hear one side of the case and then the other, and barristers rather than master detectives work things out. In short, sitting through “Witness for the Prosecution” can feel a lot like jury duty. For more of this article, go to www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/bob_abelman/