Hound of the Baskervilles
Shakespeare & Co. To September 4
By: Stephanie Farrington - Aug 19, 2011
You might be thinking of seeing a play this week. You might be thinking Shakespeare & Company’s version of The Hound of the Baskervilles sounds like a good, pithy British mystery with a comfortable hero and a well worn path through an old favorite story. You might be a member of a Sherlock Holmes society and take all things Holmesian very seriously.
If so, you should think twice about seeing Shakespeare & Company’s Hound of the Baskervilles.
If, however, you’re a big fan of Mel Brooks movies like “Young Frankenstein” or “Blazing Saddles”, if you’re a fan of “Airplane” or the Medea movies or the Wayan Brothers spoofs, sign yourself up. This is your play and these are your people, especially if you happen to be gay.
Jonathan Craig (Watson) Josh Aaron McCabe, (Holmes et al) and Ryan Winkles, (Henry Baskerville and several others) keep up a near-frantic pace and all sparkle at the Founders’ Theatre as a cast of a dozen in this broad and clever farce based on the classic Conan Doyle tale of “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”
There is the title, there are the characters and a very broad sketch of the same plot but that’s where the similarity ends.
Even on a Thursday afternoon, the trio’s comic timing, their physical grace at slapstick and their evident pleasure in their roles kept the audience roaring with laughter.
The play opens in Holmes office on Baker Street. Watson’s voiceover sets the scene and cues the audience into the fact that we are not to take this play seriously listing a litany of reasons why we may wish to think twice about seeing this place, a list that includes, lactose intolerance and a nervous temperament.
The set is sparse but elegant and evocative. It needs to be minimal since it is changed every ten minutes or so, in full view of the audience. Set and costume changes are all played for comic effect as is a great deal of interaction with the audience.
From the start, there are homoerotic double entendres that should delight readers of Holmes and Watson fan fiction but that evidently were the last straw for some serious fans of the original Holmes stories - there were several walk-outs on the day I attended the play. It’s too bad because the jokes are as innocuous as any heterocentric sex farce and normalizing them in this way feels smart, healthy and good.
The show is extremely silly. Things go wrong and the cast makes a joke of it. The plot is not the point at all. In fact, the plot is so thin, it really is only an excuse for a series of puns, slapstick moments and wordplay.