For those fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes in particular, Kate Hamill’s wacky offering will upend what you might have expected to see when you arrived at the theater. Instead, it pays little attention to the classic serious mysteries and devolves into a story more suited to caricature than character.
After a brief set of directions to the audience about unwrapping candy and turning off cell phones by the very British Brian Stanton, breaking the fourth wall, the play opens with American Dr. Joan Watson (Cheryl Daro) arriving in London to find lodging. Her desire is to find a quiet place to find peace. Instead apartment 2B is a chaotic wonderland of murder and mayhem.
It seems her flatmate is the eccentric Sherlock Holmes (Sarah Wolter), sometimes known as Shirley. She deduces at the outset that Watson is a doctor by her clean fingernails, though Watson denies throughout the play she is no such thing. A bored Sherlock sees in Watson an antidote to her ennui, and pushes and pulls Watson into her increasingly bizarre cases.
There is a murder in a hotel room that leads to Watson being pinned under a corpse in a bathtub. There’s a wife who murders her cheating husband. The flamboyant Irene Adler (from Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia) emerges to apply a mixed set of pop culture references. Though Adler only appears in one Sherlock Holmes story, she is frequently added to adaptations as a romantic figure. This allows for lots of pseudo-suggestive shtick to be broadly applied here.
Feminist in nature and political to boot, it is a frenzied exercise that never quite hits its mark. Hamill is known for her forays into literary misappropriations (Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, Dracula, to name a few), and this offering is somehow dated and tries a little too hard to wander through the world of Shakespeare and even Star Wars in its search for pop references.
Tamarra Graham gets to have some fun as a put-upon landlady (Mrs. Hudson), a distraught murderess (Mrs. Drebber), and finally the “professional” Irene Adler. Also applying broad strokes to several characters is Stanton. He is the portly Inspector Lestrade, among others, and he out-Britishes the entire cast.
Director Amie Farrell relies too heavily on over-exaggeration from the outset, so the audience is fatigued by the end of Act 1. There are human moments in both Wolter and Daro’s performances when you can see the skill of the actresses, but the weight of the farce overwhelms them.
The set executed by Destiny Manewal requires multiple settings and lots of doors. It serves the cast well as they navigate the story, though the many partial blackouts to administer set changes which are fulfilled by the entire cast as we watch takes away some of the flow of the story. Lighting by Maren Taylor is effective. Costumes by Kimberly DeShazo also add to the visual enjoyment of the production.
Quite a bit of the show depends on humor that requires some knowledge by the audience that might have been more relevant several years ago. There are moments when accents obscure the dialogue. On the plus side, however, is the energy that the cast delivers from start to finish, both on and off the stage. ICT always delivers a well crafted production, but this offering may depend too much on one’s taste for upending the literary canon.
October 15- November 2. International City Theatre, Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center, 330 East Seaside Way, Long Beach. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30; Sundays at 2. $44-59. 562-436-4610.
