Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles — the third installment of four crime novels featuring Sherlock Holmes — is one of the most famous stories ever written, and certainly the best-known in Doyle’s classic detective series. Currently onstage at Newport’s Falcon Theatre, Baskerville: a Sherlock Holmes Mystery is more camp than dread.
Falcon’s updated and more comedic take on the suspenseful mystery follows the renowned Sherlock Holmes (Matt Dentino) and his faithful companion, Dr. John Watson (Alan Kootsher), as the two are called in to investigate a series of murders that have targeted a line of heirs to the Baskerville estate. The family blames the killings on a demonic hound from hell — but is someone (or something) else the culprit?
As the duo take on their new boisterous American client, the last living heir of the Baskerville estate, the detectives parse urban legend, the terrifying and mystical hound and a dark ensemble of increasingly zany and deceptive characters.
But this production leans more heavily into the comedic side of this refreshed script and, in doing so, ignores much of the deception and suspense the text attempts to create. The play itself, written by Ken Ludwig of Lend Me a Tenor, is a comedy. However, the show’s over-the-top direction is a disservice to the source material.
Three of the five actors are tasked with creating over 40 eccentric characters that confound the mystery at hand. And though successful at creating the variance required to take on the massive number of characters, the cast’s frenetic energy quickly teeters over the edge from skillful fun into manic confusion.
This approach makes it difficult to focus on or follow the play’s storyline, causing it to be mired in its own distractions. As a result, at times, Baskerville drags on. Though the play is certainly a comedy, laughs are already generously provided in the text. In over-acting and committing so ferociously to a vaudevillian delivery of each and every moment, the production quickly becomes overwhelming.
This production likely would have been more successful with a more truthful and straightforward approach to the comedic moments, which are moments of wit more so than physical comedy, as well as a scaling back of the exaggerated atmosphere.
The set, designed by Derek Snow and Ted J. Weil, did not match the location for the majority of the production. Additionally, it had strange supplemental elements that jutted outward; and though Snow, the director, made ample use of the space, it felt confused and unfocused. The set was painted almost cartoonishly, as if to heighten the production’s silly nature.
In the fast-paced and frenzied show, each actor created such wonderful variance in voice and physicality that the over-delivery quickly became overpowering. But one stand-out performer was Nick DeNuzio, who played Sir Henry Baskerville and a mountain of other ensemble characters. DeNuzio committed to making each of his characters wholly unique and exceptionally strange, which made for entertaining performances and impressively fast changes between characters throughout the play. However, like his other castmates, he could not escape the excessively loud and forced farcical undercurrent to the production.
With flubbed lines and blackouts that took a hair too long — or didn’t happen at all — the production could have been more polished, though these issues could be due to opening night jitters. The opening night production garnered plentiful guffaws, but it lacked an overall artistic direction that could have propelled it forward into a unique and more accessible take on an old whodunit classic.
Falcon Theatre’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery runs through May 18. More info/tickets: falcontheater.net.
This article appears in May 1-8, 2019.