The 90-minute play features five actors playing 39 characters inspired by the Sherlock Holmes novel 'The Hound of the Baskervilles'
There’s a mystery afoot in Lamb’s Players Theatre’s new production of “Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery,” but audiences are more likely to be gripped by laughter than suspense.
Five actors perform a combined 39 characters with the help of dozens of accents, hats, wigs, moustaches and costumes. Cleverly directed by Robert Smyth, with assistance from Deborah Gilmour Smyth, the production is rife with quick-change artistry, sight gags, sound effects and the inventive use of simple props to flesh out the fast-moving story set in London and on the mysterious moors of Devonshire, England, in the 1880s.
Leading the cast is Brian Mackey, who plays the unflappable super-sleuth Holmes with a sober and quick-witted self-importance. And an affable John Wells III is Holmes’ eager and enterprising assistant, Doctor Watson. The other three actors play all the other 37 characters with impressive vocal skills, comic timing and inexhaustible energy.
Michael Louis Cusimano — who gallantly stepped into the show, unrehearsed, just days before opening night after an actor was injured — plays the doomed heir Charles Baskerville and his heir, American cowboy Henry Baskerville, as well as a washerwoman, police inspector, tobacco salesman and more. And Angela Chatelain Avila entertainingly plays most of the play’s female roles, including the neighbor’s gentle-natured wife Beryl, a boy servant, a maid and a shepherdess.