Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Jersey Lily / Katie Forgette

4 out of 5 stars

I attended a performance of this play last week and thoroughly enjoyed it.  The actor portraying Sherlock Holmes, Haysam Kadri, is a great talent and our city is lucky to have him.  (I saw him last month starring in MacBeth and he owned the Scottish play).

This play, at least as performed by Vertigo Theatre, is frothy and entertaining.  When Sherlock Holmes and Oscar Wilde meet onstage, it can only mean good things.  There were a lot of knowing jokes, based on the current audience’s knowledge of historical events, a lot of references to the many witty epigrams that Wilde is famous for.

I maybe would caution the Sherlock Holmes purist—I know of at least one person who might get a bit sniffy about the portrayal of Dr. Moriarty!  He is a caricature of a comic book villain, not the deadly foe that Conan Doyle wrote in <i>The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes</i>.  Played for laughs and delivering them, he is never a serious adversary in this particular play.  Think more of Boris Badenov in the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show or Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers films.

My cousin enjoyed the play too, perhaps assisted by the fact that she hasn’t read Conan Doyle’s Sherlock and therefore wasn’t at all bothered by matters related to the Holmes canon.