Baker Street purists are hereby warned that a) our sleuth's stimulant of choice is now, not cocaine, but tobacco, b) he is played by Breon Arzell (who is Black), while Dr. Watson is played by Meg Elliott (who is female), and c) the other 43 characters in Baskerville are played by a trio of actors (Rachel Livingston, Jason Richards and Gabriel Fries—one female and two male). This is because it's 2021, we're still in the middle of a pandemic and the adapter of our play is Ken Ludwig, author of the hit comedy Lend Me a Tenor.
Don't log on expecting another camp-drag Irma Vep knock-off, however. Even if the playwright hadn't specified a shape-shifting ensemble, the demands of staging plays under CDC-approved conditions by now would have rendered us accustomed to small casts—a spartan encumbrance serving, in this case, to eliminate the necessity for looney-tunes quick-change stuntwork, and in doing so, granting the protean threesome permission to reduce the slapstick silliness (though Livingston and Fries cannot resist playing the Baskerville domestic servants as grotesques lifted from Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein).
Arzell and Elliott, by contrast, never forget the limits of the small screen on which this virtual production will appear to its viewers, and rein in their performances appropriately to emerge with no more swagger than their personae's iconic status confers or the period setting mandates. (A blatantly Anglo-chauvinistic remark like "Australia or America—I get the colonies mixed up" is only slightly more xenophobic than many such snubs to be found in authentic Victorian literature.)
What most distinguishes this particular production in the evolution of Theater During Shutdown, though, is director Xavier M. Custodio and videographers Tim and Chris Kao's ingenious choice to observe "social distancing" in terms of chronological, rather than physical, isolation. By filming in separate sessions on the Metropolis stage, and splicing the various segments together in a linear montage, they are able to construct such sorely missed spectacle as foot chases and even some thrilling punch-and-throw fisticuffs choreographed by R & D Violence Design.
