Rethinking the Sherlock Holmes legend as a chick-flick/buddy pic is an outstanding idea. With Arizona Theatre Company’s Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson—Apt. 2B, playwright Kate Hamill, by the program’s own assertion “cheerfully desecrating the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,” moves the characters to post-lockdown contemporary London. Holmes is a fast-talking luddite brainiac with dazzling powers of observation and deduction; Watson is an American with a troubled past. She’s put off by Holmes at first but is soon pulled into assisting in the sleuth’s investigation of a gruesome death.
Hamill tries to mix the iconic Holmes elements – Lestrade, Irene Adler, Mrs. Hudson, even Moriarty – with modern references ranging from Indiana Jones to Batman to Star Wars to Talking Heads. It’s such a great concept, and there is so much ingenious theatricality in director Marcia Milgrom Dodge’s staging, that I wish I liked the show better. But the script is arch and over-stylized and more complicated than it needs to be, starting with a gratuitous prologue in which a traditionally male and Victorian Holmes preemptively notes how iconoclastic what we’re about to see is. There’s too much of this sort of self-delighted winking and mugging across the fourth wall, as if we’re being shown something terribly scandalous, when it’s essentially another spin on Neil Simon’s 1985 The Female Odd Couple.
This cutesy sketch comedy stuff occupies so much of the earlier part of the play that it’s jarring when, later, we’re asked to follow an overarching plot about the connection between the cases our heroes have been investigating. In Act Two, Watson (Regina A. Fernandez) finally gives up her haunted backstory, and the tone turns serious. Fernandez handles the monologue well, and though it was a bridge too far to place tinkling poignant music under it, it’s a glimmer of what the play could be without the first act’s chaotic schtick and with a calmer, more realistic approach. But this is followed by overlong, un-suspenseful climactic scenes giving us explanations we didn’t ask for.
The actors are energetic. Kelen Coleman, with her self-consciously bolt upright posture and her reflective line readings, manages to make Holmes touching as well as formidable. Michelle Duffy pushes the femme fatale vamp pretty hard as Adler, but ATC regular Aaron Cammack is restrained and capable across a variety of roles; his Lestrade is likable. Chen-Wei Liao’s set and Amanda Zieve’s lighting are handsome. With a tighter, more focused script, this premise has real possibilities.
Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson—Apt. 2B continues at Tempe Center for the Arts through Sunday, June 29; for details and tickets go atc.org.
