My Dear Watson: A Sherlock Holmes Musical
My Dear Watson: A Sherlock Holmes Musical
By Jami-Leigh Bartschi
Directed by John DiDonna and Chris Prueitt
Starring John DiDonna, Kyle Stone, and Kevin Sigman
TheEmpty Spaces Theatre Company and DiDonna Productions
Presented at the Lowndes Shakespeare Center
Orlando FL</em>
Holmes is the go-to fictional character for so many aspiring writers: He’s mostly in the public domain, you can toss any sort of murder mystery at him and make it work, his back story is preloaded into all English speaker’s back brain, and he offers a safe yet ambiguous male buddy relationship that could tilt in any direction. You can even fit him into a musical, and plenty have done just that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptations_of_Sherlock_Holmes. That’s what we have here, a new adaptation by local author Jami-Leigh Bartschi.
Dr. Watson (Stone) is on the edge of homelessness when he’s discovered by his old buddy Officer Lestrade (Justin Mousseau). Lestrade reluctantly suggests Watson meet Holmes (DiDonna), but the pair hit it off like a Victorian “Odd Couple.” Holmes does have one distressing habit: he randomly shoots off a gun in his apartment to the distress of landlady, door opener, cook, and charwoman Mrs. Hudson (Liz Murray Curtis). In Act One Holmes applies his Consulting Detective skills to solving a case of a dead body in the conservatory; Mr. Douglas (Kyle Wait) appears dead and his wife (Chelsea Panisch) is strolling with family friend Cecil Barker (Chris Markcity). Things are not as they appear; it’s an excellent study of how to create a murder mystery. Start off a reasonable yet slightly non-standard story, then remove facts Jenga-like until there only a tottering skeleton of information , then let Holmes beat the audience to the now obvious conclusions.
Act Two quickly abandons the Douglas’s; he’s lost at sea and she’s off in South Africa and Holmes is on to chasing Dr. Moriarty (Sigman) to their ultimate yet ambiguous demise. Why the pair are sworn enemies isn’t very clear, and soon Holmes is freaked out by a letter; he and Watson flee to the Swiss Alps for a back projected fight to the finish on a waterfall. While the staging is clever and effective, the story is weak on motivations and the songs are generally forgettable. The only exceptions might be “Extraordinary Man” and “It was Worth the Wound”, but when the show wrapped up I asked someone to hum a song from the show. No luck.
Without microphones it was often hard to hear the dialog, and when the three piece band plays, they tend to drown out the singers. The two level set was effective; a trademark of the directors’ staging are continuously morphing projections and the back wall. For some reason there was a map of Norway; nothing important happened there but it did set the atmosphere nicely. The story still needs work; the acts don’t connect with each other very tightly. Holms pegs between smug confidence and total fear: the smugness reduces his likability and the fear his believability. Another odd plot point is Mr. Sigman appearing briefly as a gardener in Act One. Was he Moriarty gathering information or simply a double casting of a minor character with no lines? The first could be interesting if we knew what Moriarty learned and how he used it, the second case implies “Write him out.” Does the world need another Holmes play or another Holmes musical? Nothing I saw tonight made me scream “yes.”
For more information on Empty Spaces Theater Company, visit http://www.emptyspacestheatre.org
