High school teacher pens Sherlock Holmes musical
It’s no mystery: The idea for the musical “My Dear Watson” came to Jami-Leigh Bartschi in a dream. Eight years later, the local composer and highschool music teacher is taking that dream to the annual New York Musical Festival.
In just a few weeks, the Orlando cast and Bartschi will head to the Big Apple, and it doesn’t take a great detective to deduce what might happen: Exposure in New York could lead to bigger things for the show about Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick, Dr. Watson. The musical already has one important fan: The estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the British author who wrote the Holmes mystery novels beginning in 1887.
“My heart is just bursting,” said Bartschi, 32. “We’re going to see what happens.”
The Longwood resident has been a fan of the supersleuth since reading 1901’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles” in eighth grade.
“I just fell in love; I really connected with him,” she said of Holmes, known for his violin playing and coldly logical deductions. “Of all the great literary characters, there are a lot of lovers and fighters. There aren’t a lot of heroes who are thinkers.”
She also had an early love of the arts, taking up piano at age
3. “I learned to read music before words,” she said.
Her passions unexpectedly combined in early 2009.
“I woke up in the middle of the night and thought, ‘I want to write a Sherlock Holmes musical,’ ” Bartschi recalled. “Then it came to me all at once, the whole basic gist of it.”
The story incorporates elements of such works as 1887’s “A Study in Scarlet” and 1914’s “The Valley of Fear.” It is focused on the unusual relationship between Holmes and Watson, who serves as the great detective’s biographer while attempting to help him solve his cases.
“One of the things that always interested me the most was their friendship, what it takes for someone like Holmes to love and be loved,” said Bartschi, chorus director at Wekiva High School in Apopka.
While studying at Winter Park’s Rollins College, where she earned a master’s degree in 2012, Bartschi presented the musical to Kevin Gray, a Broadway performer who was teaching there. He was skeptical.
“If I don’t like the first two pages, we’re not going to talk again,” she remembers Gray telling her.
But they did talk again — repeatedly. Gray became a champion of “My Dear Watson,” which she eventually used as her master’s thesis. “He really shaped the work,” Bartschi said.
Gray also introduced her to John DiDonna, who is directing the New Yorkbound production and starring as Sherlock. “This show just turned into a great surprise,” says DiDonna, who chairs the theater department at Valencia College and leads the “Phantasmagoria” theatrical troupe.
Through the years, Bartschi has edited the 90-minute piece, used readings and workshops to refine it, and staged a production at The Master’s Academy private high school in Oviedo. “It’s been a pretty steady work in progress,” she said.
A nerve-racking moment came when she realized one of the stories she wanted to incorporate into the work was not in the public domain. She tracked down the Conan Doyle Estate’s lawyer online and asked for permission to use it.
“It was terrifying,” she said. “If they had said no, that would have been the end right there.”
But not only did she get permission, she also got an endorsement.
“The Conan Doyle Estate’s main aim is to have the voice of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle heard by modern audiences,” said estate director Richard Doyle in a statement. “I am sure my greatuncle would have been delighted that his family, through the Conan Doyle Estate, is supporting ‘My Dear Watson.’ His passion for innovation and the arts is beautifully represented by Jami-Leigh Bartschi.”
Rachel Sussman, producing artistic director of the New York Musical Festival, is also cheering the show on.
“It has a really exciting layer of British murder mystery detective-novel style that you don’t always get in musical theater,” she said. The festival, which runs July 10-Aug. 5, draws thousands and features more than 50 shows.
Sussman thinks the time is right to see Sherlock on stage.
“It’s such a part of the cultural zeitgeist right now,” she says, pointing to the BBC’s popular TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the detective, as well as CBS’s long-running modern adaptation titled “Elementary.”
Bartschi is still planning fundraisers to raise the last few thousand dollars needed for the New York trip, which will cost about $20,000.
But her eye is on the prize.
“I don’t think it ever occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to do it,” she said. “A work is not anything, just black and white on paper, until it’s brought to life.”