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Sherlock Holmes - The Early Years
By DAVID SHEWARD
Published: October 2, 2007
| With the success of The Producers, Urinetown, and Monty Python’s Spamalot, parody musicals are the order of the day. The trick to making these extended sketches work is creating characters who are believable as well crazy and giving them solid goals so the audience will care about them. In their bizarre book for Sherlock Holmes (The Early Years), Kate Ferguson and Robert Hudson employ wild Pythonesque humor to send up literature's greatest detective but fail to give the necessary human dimension that would have made this variation on Arthur Conan Doyle more than a cartoon. As the title indicates, the action follows the creation of Holmes’ iconic personality and how he acquired his signature props (the pipe, deerstalker cap, etc.). In this version, Holmes has a sexual attraction for a surprisingly handsome Watson — leading to a host of double entendres and cracks about bachelors spending their evenings pursuing “shared intellectual rigor.” This theme culminates with a satirical ballad between the sleuths imagining a future where such relationships are out in the open. (A joke already used to better effect in Spamalot.) Gavin Lodge’s Holmes is attractive, cool, and brainy, but we never see the passion underneath the brittle exterior. The contrast would have made the comedy stronger. William Connell is a properly clueless Watson. The homoerotic plot is but one thread in this web of parody. The strongest strands are provided by Laura Shoop as Mary, a woman from Holmes’ past and secretly a criminal involved with a villainous group known as the Spider. (Web! Spider! Get it? Then you’ll get most of Sherlock’s jokes too.) Shoop combines just the right amount of lunacy with credibility to keep us interested. She makes the most of composer Jared M. Dembowski and lyricist Susannah Pearse's pastiche score, singing kooky Lloyd Webberish tunes about seeking revenge on Holmes by rearranging his stationery. Director Nona Lloyd and choreographer Merete Muenter deftly block the chorus and principal in these numbers, making fun of the crowd control in British megamusicals like Les Misérables. There is also a clever musical-chairs staging of the denouement. Susan Louise O’Connor as a sarcastic Mrs. Hudson, William Ryall as an imbecilic Inspector Lestrade, and Mike Masters as a kinky earl rack up the highest laugh scores in this hit-or-miss show. A trio of dancing policemen, an unexplained transvestite nurse, and some business with Queen Victoria’s bloomers fail to raise more than the odd giggle. |