The 35th season of Quogue’s Hampton Theatre Company began last week with the opening of “Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery.”
“Baskerville,” written by Ken Ludwig, is based on the crime novel “The Hound of the Baskervilles” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. While the novel is a strict detective story, rich with the haunting atmosphere of the English countryside, the play ventures into broad comedy, brought to a frenzied pitch as directed by Diana Marbury.
Plot is mostly secondary in “Baskerville,” the clues and convoluted family ties rattled off so quickly the play is left mostly in the service of comedy. Suffice to say that it begins with a Sir Charles Baskerville found dead on the moor near his home in Devon. Was he murdered, or the victim of a legendary “hellhound” that supposedly haunts the moors? Henry, a Texas tycoon next in line to take over the estate, heads to the Baskerville mansion with Sherlock Holmes and John Watson to solve the mystery.
Matthew Conlon, so good in last year’s hilarious “A Comedy of Tenors,” is perfectly cast here as Sherlock. The actor highlights the detective’s vanity and self-importance, marking himself as the straight man in this farcical production. He plays Sherlock much the same as Conan Doyle wrote him, as brilliant, though almost equally irritating, and doted on by the faithful John Watson (played with tweedy dignity by Duncan Hazard).
The other three actors, Tina Jones, Andrew Botsford, and Ben Schnickel, do much of the heavy lifting in this production, each inhabiting dozens of characters. If not all of them come off, it may be more significant to note that most of them do. Mr. Botsford, who has a penchant in Hampton Theatre productions for playing mealy-mouthed connivers, here does especially well in his portrayal of Henry, a gun-toting Texas rube. And Mr. Schnickel hits his high note as a pretentious Castilian hotel concierge, with an outrageously overwrought wig and mustache.
But when the big laughs come, they are almost always delivered by Tina Jones, who takes on her personas with a rarefied comic gusto. She nails an Irish nurse, a Cockney carriage driver, and an English coquette, among others, with a spritely energy and (to this ear) a flawless verbal technique. The play is most alive when she is onstage.
And it is her turn as Inga, the Baskervilles’ German housemaid, that solicits the most uproarious laughter. Owing a debt perhaps to Teri Garr in “Young Frankenstein,” Inga’s verbal malapropisms — she pronounces her Vs as Ws, for example — are delivered in a starkly imperious German accent, tinged with the perfect amount of hyperbole. Inga appears in just a handful of scenes (you’ll wish there were more), though Ms. Jones is so good in the role it becomes the comic centerpiece of the production.
Also asked to stretch here is Sean Marbury, whose set design has to keep up with a dizzying pace of scene changes. Many of his choices are clever and evocative, often relying on a rear-wall projection to summon a London train station or wind-swept streets, for example. There are gunshots and smoke machines (beware, first row ticketholders), and Sherlock and Watson’s visit to the opera is assembled with a striking economy.
Less successful is Mr. Marbury’s attempt to evoke the stark moors and bogs of Devon, perhaps an impossible task on the stage, but which Conan Doyle used to memorable advantage in the novel — the landscape portrayed with such existential portent that it rose to the level of metaphor.
But then this “Baskerville” is more farce than noir, even if by the play’s end Ms. Marbury lets the slapstick skirt dangerously close to clowning (one actor merely changes hats from one line of dialogue to the next to invoke different characters). Nevertheless, for those who like their comedies loose and broad, “Baskerville” mostly delivers, the performance I witnessed culminating in a partial standing ovation. It seemed, if nothing else, a nod to the stamina of these hard-working actors, and of course the comic bravura of Tina Jones.
The show runs through Nov. 10.