The Southampton Cultural Center is offering three-course dinner-theater packages with “Sherlock’s Secret Life,” its current production from Boots on the Ground Theater. This critic’s advice: Skip the dessert course, because the play is a delightful and satisfying confection.
Ed Lange’s play, here in its Long Island premiere, is a brew of mystery and comedy. It purports to tell the story of Holmes’s first case, which centers on Marianna, a beautiful young woman brought to Baker Street by Scotland Yard’s Inspector Lestrade because she has lost the memory of everything but her first name.
Twists and turns follow en route to the mystery’s unraveling. Yet the reason to see the play has less to do with the plot than with the quirks and repartee of the characters, most of whom will be familiar to Conan Doyle cognoscenti.
The play opens in 1928, with an elderly bearded man sound asleep in an armchair in a Victorian-style sitting room. Meet Dr. Watson in his twilight years. Once jolted awake by his housekeeper, he informs the audience that he is about to tell the one story of Sherlock Holmes that he has never revealed before.
Played with impeccable comic timing and deep-voiced delivery by Daniel Becker — who, a bit of detective work revealed, is a psychiatrist as well as an actor — the older Watson is both the cantankerous narrator and the cornerstone of the play.
The action then shifts to the opposite side of the stage, which is 221B Baker Street in 1885, where Holmes (Tom Rosante) and young Watson (Thomas Schiavoni) are startled by the shriek of their landlady, Mrs. Hudson (Bonnie Grice), announcing the arrival of Lestrade and Marianna. The game is afoot, as Holmes soon puts it.
The sleuth immediately deduces from her voice that Marianna is from Tewksbury in Gloucestershire and that her mother was from Northern France. His powers of ratiocination, however, are soon undone by his attraction to Marianna. In fact, an amusing through line is provided by the competition between Holmes and young Watson for Marianna’s favors, and the consequent clouding of everybody’s judgment.
The older Watson comments on the action throughout, providing a witty and often caustic dimension to the otherwise somewhat thin plot. When young Watson asks Holmes why he has invited Marianna to return to his “inner sanctum” the following day, old Watson interjects, “Because he has completely lost control of his hormones, that’s bloody well why.”
But there is more to the older Watson than his wit. Mr. Becker delivers a moving soliloquy late in the first act, when he reflects on his and the others’ lost youth and his own failing vitality, ruing that “it won’t be long before I meet the maker of this failing carcass of mine.” Old Watson, and Mr. Becker’s performance, gives the play a depth it would otherwise have lacked.
That said, there are many funny set pieces involving the other characters, including Lestrade’s failed attempt to shoot Holmes’s archenemy, Professor Moriarty, “from all of 20 feet” as he tries to flee Holmes’s apartment through an open window. Best of all is young Watson’s “examination” of Marianna, during which he asks her to open her bodice so he can listen to her heartbeat but neglects to don the stethoscope’s eartips.
All the actors handle their parts with ease. Mr. Rosante is as convincingly pompous as he is love-struck, and Mr. Schiavoni is winningly sheepish in his advances toward Marianna.
Ms. Grice morphs from a prickly landlady whose mordant quips at times rival old Watson’s into a voice of reason. She provides perspective on her tenants, who, as a result of their desire for Marianna, “have sent all of 221 Baker Street to the other side of the looking glass.” She also gets to wield a pistol. Like Mr. Becker’s, her performance provides ballast for the play.
Mr. Lange, the playwright, handles the characters and all of the play’s moving parts deftly, and the action never flags. His strongest points are his clever and often over-the-top dialogue and his deployment of old Watson as a sagacious and rueful framing device.
Ms. Grice, who produced the play, also designed the costumes and props with a sure hand that reflects her fascination with Victoriana in all its forms. Under the guidance of Josephine Teresi-Wallace, who directs and designed the sets, the action shifts seamlessly between past and present.
The cast also includes Bethany Trowbridge as Mollie, old Watson’s housekeeper, Richard Gardini as Lestrade, Alyssa Kelly as Marianna, and John Lovett as Professor Moriarty.
Performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 7 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. through March 22. Tickets are $25, $15 for students under 21. A free matinee for high school students will take place on Saturday at 2.
