The ensemble (Photo by Jason Niedle/TETHOS)
Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris
Laguna Playhouse
Through March 30
All that talent! Starting with musical theater actors who move with the grace of gazelles and with the voices of songbirds; stir in a topflight design team (sets by Stephen Gifford, costumes by Alex Jaeger, plus Matthew Novoty’s lights and Ian Scot’s pristine sound design that creates a perfect balance between the miked performers and the five piece band under Alby Potts’s musical direction). Jill Gorrie’s choreography adds to the flights of fancy and fancifulness.
In the very good ensemble, Darcy Rose Byrnes stands out as a cockney maid who transitions from operatic tones before returning to her character with a voice that sounds like a bandsaw cutting through corrugated steel. She appears to be having the time of her life.
All of this is in the service of Omri Schein and director/artistic director David Ellenstein’s (with music by Daniel M. Lincoln) paean to a number of tropes, starting with Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick, Watson. Like all murder mysteries, it’s also an homage to the powers of empirical evidence, unearthing the truth about a murderer and the murdered, and revealing how the truth is seldom what it seems. It takes a kind of science, derived from eagle-eyed observation, to defy the dull, commonplace presumptions that we take for wisdom. Herein lies one gleaming opportunity to tie their musical to the decline of our empire, and perhaps the British empire as well. (Brexit was fueled by its own brands of stale, faulty presumptions, ignorance, and misinformation, much like current chaos in the USA.) This however, is of no interest to the creators, who are primarily invested in, to quote Ellenstein, “a raucous good time at the theater.”
In order to access that “raucous good time,” Watson is in absentia, or seems to be, chasing riches in Argentina. This leaves Holmes (Paul Slade Smith) with only his eccentricities, both arrogant and vulnerable, to keep him company. That is, until Watson’s assertive and sharp-witted sister (Shannon O’Boyle) shows up as a replacement for Watson, challenging Holmes’ sexism and other shortcomings. So in a roundabout way, we’re revisiting the mid 1960s via both Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. Can the female servant/sidekick reform the hubristic master?
The “raucous good time,” however, lacks raucousness. It’s more like a visit to an early 20th century music hall, which is what Gifford’s set emblematizes. We get jokes about snooty Germans, the Von Schwanz’s (their name is a window onto the style of humor) masking their poverty with ostentatious attire, anti-Semitism, and aristocratic imperiousness. (Michael Scott Harris and Katie Karel portray the Germans very well.) A rabbi (Pat Towne) puts in a jocular appearance. Much of the wit gets woven into frayed cloth, including an inspector (Martin Kildare) who, being British and innocent of any crime yet oh so honorable, turns himself in nonetheless. Being the police inspector, he turns himself in to himself, and is, therefore, at liberty to release himself, to himself, as he chooses. He does so with a song parody lifted from Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore, “I Am an Englishman.” Add this to the long list of filched tropes.
There is also a structural shortcoming in that so many of the songs echo the plot rather than driving it forward, lending to a blend of silliness and stasis. And when your template is Sherlock Holmes attempting to solve a crime, the plot, and moving it forward, is paramount.
It’s always good to see a theater with a full house, so Laguna Playhouse is doing something very right. I heard utterings of audience approval during intermission, though about 10% of the audience failed to return, for whatever that means.
To lay my cards on the table, I wish this musical were in the service of something either larger, or smaller. If it’s going to be about nothing and traffic in stolen tropes, then let it wallow in unfettered pointlessness, which is the calling card for meaningful comedy in an age of absurdity: the ultimate parody of meaning itself.
Here, however, the vision is middling — escapist yet still striving to score a few points about feminism and bigotry, without actually scoring them. I keep tracking back to Joe Keyes and Rob Elk’s Bob’s Holiday Office Party, a comedy, based on the most generic cliche of the office party. Each character is a living lampoon in a plot that is so vulgar, so scatological, so upside down, and so absolutely nuts that it’s about nothing and everything in the same breath.
Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Rd., Laguna Beach; Wed.-Sat., 7:30 pm, Thurs. and Sat., 2 pm; Sun., 1 pm and 5:30 pm; thru March 30. www.lagunaplayhouse.com. Running time: Two and a half hours, including intermission
