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The game’s afoot in Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – #2B from the moment a mysterious door rolls in front of the curtain and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s beloved mysteries are transported to 2022. Instead of Sherlock Holmes and his trusty sidekick and adviser John Watson playing cat and mouse with criminals and kooks in the late 19th century, playwright Kate Hamill explores what types of mysteries the duo would solve as women in modern times. Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – #2B is onstage at Synchronicity Theatre through October 23.
Hamill has a knack for adapting the classics into manners plays. Her comedic adaptations of Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility and Vanity Fair have made her one of the most produced playwrights in America for the last five years. Synchronicity produced her Sense & Sensibility in 2017.
Though she has an affinity for Jane Austen, Hamill does a fine job exploring The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which is a collection of short stories by Doyle that was originally published in The Strand Magazine from July 1891 to June 1892. The stories were so popular that Doyle spent most of his writing career expanding the world of Holmes and Watson into other short fiction and novels.
Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – #2B. was commissioned by Kansas City Rep and received a world premiere there in February. This time, Sherlock, whom her landlady calls Shirley, is a reclusive, headstrong and eccentric investigator awaiting her next adventure. And Joan Watson is a recent divorcee from America who goes to London seeking a fresh start. Together, with Watson’s medical expertise and Holmes’ keen attention to detail, the pair solve a variety of crimes, from the murder of a man found in a motel to the case of a right-wing politician who cheated on his wife. Hamill played Watson in the world premiere.
In Synchronicity’s production, directed by Suehyla E. Young, Tara Ochs plays Holmes and Karen Cassady plays Watson. These two have great chemistry, but I’d like to see them lean into the screwball comedy a bit more. Ochs is completely believable as the genius, smartphone-averse Holmes. Her performance is so good, she make the high energy seem “elementary.”
Watson perhaps has the greatest arc as a character. She goes from a disgruntled divorcee who gets queasy around blood to an instrumental part of Holmes’ operation –but not without some ridiculousness along the way. Cassady captures this as she starts off completely annoyed with Holmes to only half annoyed. In the bit where the two pretend to be nuns, she hams it up just the right amount.
Rounding out the cast, O’Neil Delapenha and Vallea E. Woodbury play multiple roles throughout the play. Delapenha plays the villain Lestrade, along with various other characters. Woodberry portrays the landlady, a grieving widow and a cunning femme fatale.
With deft actors, this cast really brings back the meaning of the word “play.” The production is at its best when the cast is allowed to be uninhibited — which of course means very choreographed — in their silliness. Moments such as Watson being pinned under a corpse in a bathtub or Holmes trying to open a laptop are guffaw funny. I just wish there were more of them because the show lags at times. There are parts of the second act where Hamill tries to over explain the play’s relevance to present-day life. These, along with uneven direction, lead to a loss in momentum.
Kristina White’s set design is one of the most impressive and cumbersome parts of this production. Holmes’ apartment is, in a word, chaotic. A painted-over image of Marie Antoinette anchors the space, which is cluttered with taxidermied animals, Chinese food containers, fencing equipment and an ever-present skeleton. The vibrant blue walls and floor and complete chaos of the place makes it striking to look at, in addition to a creative use of a neon sign to indicate location changes.
However, White and Young never quite find the right rhythm for scene transitions, which often feel uncoordinated and unnecessarily complicated in the small black box theater. Moving the door back and forth from one end of the stage to the next doesn’t jell. The stagehands are intentionally visible onstage and true to the farcical nature of Doyle’s writing; their assistance with the mischief fits the piece. But it’s also clunky in a way that distracts from the witty one-liners and Holmesian hijinks.
More than a century since the stories were first published, modern adaptations of Doyle’s work make their way into pop culture, such as the CBS series Elementary and the BBC series Sherlock. Hamill’s new play gives the stories refresh in the way of Lucy and Ethel, Cagney and Lacey or Rizzoli and Isles. With all the makings of a good buddy comedy, there’s no doubt that Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – #2B will have a life in the theater for a long time.
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Kelundra Smith, an ArtsATL Editor-at-Large, is a critic and arts journalist whose mission is to connect people to cultural experiences and each other. Her work appears in The New York Times, ESPN’s Andscape, American Theatre and elsewhere. She is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association and the Society of Professional Journalists.
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