This year is no exception. The American premiere production of The Secret of Sherlock Holmes is currently playing at the Founder's Theater. But it is an odd choice of material because it is neither scary, nor mysterious, and certainly not spine-tingling, nor suspenseful.
And I would also go so far as to suggest that it is not a play. As written by author Jeremy Paul (who penned a number of episodes of a Sherlock Holmes series for Britain's Granada Television that aired in America on PBS a few years ago), The Secret of Sherlock Holmes is a compilation of bits and pieces of dialogue gleaned from the 50-odd short and long stories in which Sherlock Holmes, the famous prototype of a modern detective, appears with his friend and confidant, Doctor John Watson. It is an earnestly crafted patchwork quilt of quips, aphorisms, epigrams, retorts, puns, one-liners, and adages.
However, early on one gets the feeling one is listening to someone reading aloud from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations . There is no real drama in any of it. And, of course, Holmes gets all the best lines; Dr.
Watson is there merely to feed him his cues. The Secret of Sherlock Holmes apparently was meant to be an in- depth examination of a strong friendship between two men of quite different temperaments in turn-of-the- century England, but it bogs down half way through and fails to go anywhere. Sherlock Holmes, the creation of novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, made his first appearance in 1887 in A Study in Scarlet .
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes were serialized in 1891-93 in London's Strand magazine and later published as books. The Holmes character quickly became immensely popular, but Doyle eventually tired of him and attempted to kill off his hero on a snow-covered side of a cliff in Switzerland as he pursued his arch-villain and nemesis Professor Moriarty, "the Napoleon of crime." However, after considerable public outrage, Doyle, in 1903, was compelled to revive Holmes.
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