Review: HOLMES AND WATSON at PCPA: Solvang Festival Theater

With a crack of thunder and a flash of lightning, “Holmes and Watson” begins. The new PCPA production on Solvang’s outdoor stage offers twisty delights to hardcore Sherlock fans and regular theater goers alike. 

At the top of the play, we find Dr. John Watson (Don Stewart) in the midst of a once grand great hall on a Scottish estate. Dr. Evans (Mark Booher) explains that he has transformed the manor into an asylum for the insane and he needs Dr. Watson’s help with a few curious cases.

Three years before the present action of the play, Sherlock Holmes tumbled to his death along with his nemesis Professor Moriarty. Three of the inmates claim to be Sherlock Holmes. In this highly irregular circumstance, Dr. Watson, as the audience’s surrogate for a sane everyman, must determine if one of them is the real, somehow surviving, Sherlock Holmes. 

Playwright Jeffrey Hatcher’s plot is pleasantly twisty without exhausting our willingness to keep guessing in this “whoisit.” Like Arthur Conan Doyle’s original Sherlock, revelations stay a step ahead of our reasoning as red herrings and subterfuge are thrown in our way.

The strangeness of the asylum is rounded out by two other rather odd characters–the Matron, (Christen Celaya) whose Scottish brogue is as peaty as a shot of Glenfiddich, and The Orderly (Michael Trembley) who obeys Dr. Evans’s orders with quiet efficiency. 

The production’s delightful theatrical effects quicken the pace of the mystery. The set, by designer Kevin Dudley, convulses with Gothic seediness, complete with commanding tracery windows and a peeling ancestral hunting portrait. It is as moody as the moors. The lighting, as designed by Cody Soper, hits the theatrical haze that wafts through scenes to sculpt moments of high action and envelope the story in mystery.

Director Michael Brusasco and the cast amplify the theatrical potential of the motif of disguise and misdirection (two of the original Sherlock Holmes’s specialties). Each of the asylum’s patients presents a Sherlock distinct from the other, and yet convincing in his own way. Holmes 1 (Mike Fiore) leans into Sherlock’s haughty self-assurance; Toby Tropper’s Holmes 2 enlarges the glint of madness lurking in the great sleuth while Michael Gould’s Holmes 3 remains wholly inscrutable. 

Santa Barbara Awards - Live Stats

Best Musical - Top 3

1. SHREK (Central Coast Theatre Company)

22.7% of votes

2. LEGALLY BLONDE (Central Coast Theatre Company)

17.7% of votes

3. YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (Theatre Group at SBCC)

14.9% of votes

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