Sherlock Holmes and the Hound of the Baskervilles
Seattle Repertory Theater 2013
Scenery, lights, and projections by L.B. Morse
Costumes by Deb Trout
Sound by Paul James Prendergast
In adapting the classic tale of a hellhound stalking the English moors, they’ve invented scenes and dialogue that hew much more closely to the spirit of the material than Hollywood’s recent bare-knuckled fumblings. There’s a bit of Arthur Conan Doyle, a bit of Joss Whedon, and the result is noisy, raucous fun—as English as a box of snuff, as witty as an evening with Oscar Wilde.
Director Allison Narver moves her players around in an elaborate display of dominoes, each one glancing off the other until only the survivors remain. Not only has she cast her two principals well, but the supporting cast is uniformly sublime.
The new adaptation of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” makes you believe, again, in the Seattle Repertory Theatre’s capacity for illusion through superb stagecraft — here applied to a brain-teasing mystery that only Holmes could solve, and only his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, could dream up.
In one of the most elaborately designed and staged productions the Rep has presented in some years, we are transported through teeming streets of Victorian London into the malevolent fog of the Devon moor, from the grand parlor of a nobleman’s country estate to its pitch-dark wine cellar.
This eye-popping entertainment directed by Allison Narver is as much an homage to canny theatrical storytelling as it is to Doyle’s famed whodunit, scripted both faithfully and freely by David Pichette and R. Hamilton Wright.
Even when the exposition is knotty, Narver and cast unfailingly balance sincere melodrama with laughable spoofery.