By Jerry Fink (contact)

Thu, Jan 31, 2008 (2 a.m.)

The husband and wife team of Eric and Jayne Post has been on a murderous rampage for 20 years, killing people in dinner theaters across the West.

The spree started in Sacramento, moved to Lake Tahoe and finally hit Las Vegas. For a couple of years the Posts slew them at the Showboat out on Boulder Highway. Then they killed them at the Egg & I on West Sahara Avenue for almost eight years.

Now they’re knocking them dead at the Canyon Club in the Four Queens on Fremont Street.

“Marriage Can Be Murder” is an interactive murder mystery that mingles meals, mystery and theatrics — a whodunit that includes a salad, entree and dessert.

“We wrote it so that even if you don’t figure it out but laughed all evening, we did our job,” Eric Post says.

The production debuted at the Canyon Club on Wednesday night. At 200 seats, the room is almost twice the size of the Egg & I. “The larger space lends itself to more theatrics,” Jayne Post says.

The couple created the show for a dinner theater in Sacramento’s Old Town almost 20 years ago. Their show was replacing a dark and heavy dinner mystery, so the Posts decided to go for the funny bone.

The production changes its story line about every four months, alternating solutions to the murder and bringing in new cast members. Half the fun is figuring out who in the audience is in the cast.

Post calls his wife the comedic genius in the family. She’s a stand-up comedian who for the past six years has been a slot host for the MGM Grand in addition to acting in the dinner theater production.

She says they’ve had offers to take the show to Branson, Mo., and other places but they prefer Vegas. “We love the energy and the idea that we can get a hamburger at 3 in the morning if we want to.”

There have been a lot of memorable moments over the years — one of them being when an amateur cast member finished his salad, stood up and announced prematurely, “Yeah, I killed everybody.”

“We’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, we’ve got an hour and a half left to go, what are we going to do?’ ” Jayne Post says. They rushed him out of the room and quickly came up with another killer. “The audience thought it was planned.”

Details: 6 to 8:15 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays; Canyon Club at The Four Queens; $44.95-$69.95; 387-5175

Another entree

While we’re on the subject of dinner theater, the “Sopranos’ Last Supper” has landed at the Riviera, where it debuts Tuesday.

The mob spoof premiered at Krave almost two years ago, moved to the Empire Ballroom for a few months and is now where it probably should have been to begin with — at a casino that had real mob connections back in the ’50s and ’60s.

The “Last Supper” takes place in the Bada Bang Nightclub, where there is a lot of singing and dancing and mobster stuff going on while the audience dines and becomes part of the show. The premise of the story is the impending incarceration of Tony Baritone — his family throws a “going up the river” party for him.

Details: 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays; Comedy Club at the Riviera; $65-$95; 794-9433

Tommy Thompson Trio

Saxophonist Tommy Thompson, vocalist Jeannie Snow and keyboardist Dennis Mellen are trying to breathe some life into the Old Las Vegas mystique, performing gigs in the place where, some say, the lounge scene began — the Casbar inside the Sahara.

Actually, there were other lounges and lounge performers before Louis Prima ignited the Casbar scene in 1954 (just as there were other casinos on the Strip before Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo in 1946).

But Prima and the Casbar are the best-known of the casino legends (which include the Mary Kaye Trio, the group that probably did start the lounge era when it debuted in 1950 at the Ramon Room in the Last Frontier — which became the New Frontier and soon will be the Plaza).

Thompson’s high-energy jazz shows are attracting some of Vegas’ top lounge performers, who drop by to jam with the crew or just listen in — among them Kim Styles and Denise Celemente.

Details: 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. Tuesdays through Sundays; Sahara’s Casbar Theatre Lounge; free

A cappella

George Wallace calls them “my kids.” Everyone else calls them Mosaic.

The talented group of young a cappella singers has been a part of Wallace’s show at the Flamingo for the past year.

Wallace is not alone in his faith in the group. Boyz II Men recently named Mosaic the “next great a cappella group” in a competition sponsored by CBS’ “The Early Show.”

The group was founded three years ago in Orlando, Fla., by Josh Huslig. His co-stars are Sean Gerrity, Corwyn Hodge, Troy Dolendo, Heath Burgett and John Gibson.

Details: George Wallace, co-starring Mosaic; 10 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; Flamingo; $65.95-$82.50; 733-3333