Baskerville
Yes, yes, this is a retelling of Arthur Conan Doyle's famous mystery The Hound of the Baskervilles, featuring his even more famous creation, the brilliant and cantankerous consulting detective Sherlock Holmes. But really, it's the second stop on the Omri Schein Sherlock Super Show, which started out this summer up at North Coast Rep with the musical The Remarkable Mr. Holmes. (It is perhaps worth noting that Baskerville is considerably less bawdy; Coronado is not Solana Beach.)
There, Schein was content to toil as a book and lyrics man, letting Andrew Ableson take on the sweet comedic gig of playing multiple characters with multiple accents sporting multiple arrangements of facial hair. But if memory serves, Ableson was what, four people, all of them clerics? Child’s play. Here, Schein lets Ken Ludwig do the word-work — though there is a similar reliance on Old World mispronunciations and humor of both the broad and self-conscious variety to lighten the murderous mood of what is an especially bloody and even scary Holmes story — and steps onto the stage, into the quick-change costume room, and behind the whiskers to play, off the top of my head, a country doctor, a Russian butler, a Russian butler’s insane brother in law, an Italian hotel-keeper, an operatic tenor, a cockney street urchin, an English butterfly collector, a flirtatious old woman, a Nietzsche-quoting cab driver — you get the idea. The remarkable thing is the riveting combination of gung-ho energy and yes, dramatic skill he brings the task. He has help in presenting the 37 characters who are not Holmes and his partner in solving crime John Watson, but it’s Schein who has the audience smiling in recognition at each new iteration.
When
Ongoing until Sunday, November 20, 2022
Hours
| Sundays, 2pm & 7pm |
| Wednesdays, 2pm & 7pm |
| Thursdays, 7pm |
| Fridays, 7pm |
| Saturdays, 2pm & 7pm |