The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
A fresh take on Ludwig’s ‘Baskerville’
Director: Fun to watch 3 actors play dozens of roles
Unlike countless dramatists unable to top, or even match, the commercial success of their first smash play, Ken Ludwig has not only adapted quite well, but quite often.
Since arriving on Broadway in 1989 as if launched from a cannon with “Lend Me A Tenor,” the most successful farce of its day this side of Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off,” Ludwig has adapted several plays and musicals from source material, including “Crazy For You” (a greatly revised version of The Gershwins’ 1930 hit musical “Girl Crazy”), “Treasure Island” (from Robert Louis Stevenson’s briny classic), and “Twentieth Century” (revising Hecht and MacArthur’s 1932 screwball comedy).
Ludwig, who has continued writing farces with moderate, if less, success than “Lend Me A Tenor,” continues his string of adaptations with “Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery,” which starts performances Wednesday on Long Wharf Theatre’s main stage. The comic mystery is the lively offspring of Ludwig and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose 1902 novel “The Hound of the Baskervilles” serves as Ludwig’s source material.
The plot of Ludwig’s adaptation all goes according to Doyle, who sends Sherlock Holmes and his partner in crime-solving, Dr. Watson, to the moors of Devonshire to investigate a family curse, murder and a mysteriously super-sized hound with a howl so spooky it would give Alan Ginsberg paws. Yet, Ludwig’s nimble hand gooses Doyle’s indelible mystery and suspense with a heavy dose of wordplay, puns and old-school wit, as director Brendon Fox explained before a recent rehearsal.
“What is fun, or where some of the humor comes from, (is) watching
three actors — who I call ‘The Chameleons’ — play something like 36 roles between them,” said Fox. “It’s astonishing how fast those actors transform, sometimes right before our very eyes. But at the same time, they’re telling the story in earnest.
“So it’s not a send-up. It’s not a parody. It’s not a pastiche. It’s in earnest, so you can really follow along. That’s our challenge, our tightrope.”
Ludwig adapted “Baskerville,” which officially opens March 7 and continues through March 25, in the same spirit of the play “The 39 Steps,” adapted by Patrick Barlow, Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film, to cite a recent example of several intimate, quick-dress comedies of this nature. That play employs two actors to play everyone else besides the two leads.
Fox’s cast includes Alex Moggridge as Holmes and Daniel Pearce as Dr. Watson. His three chameleons are Kelly Hutchinson, Christopher Livingston and Brian Owen.
Fox’s passion for the script’s juxtaposition of mystery and physical comedy may only be surpassed by his love for narrative theater, he said. Fox studied for his chosen profession at Northwestern University in Chicago, where narrative, or readers’ theater, has thrived for decades. Frank Galati, whose adaptation and direction of Steinbeck’s iconic novel “The Grapes of Wrath” exemplifies the best of narrative theater, is Northwestern’s theater program’s most famous practitioner. He certainly influenced Fox, the director said.
“Frank Galati was a mentor of mine,” said Fox, a Windy City native who grew up in Greenwich since the tender age of 5. “I majored in performance studies and you can trace a line from there to now. I’ve done ‘Peter and the Star Catcher,’ ‘Shipwrecked’ and now this. I’ve done modern plays, and Shakespeare, but I do love works that have some kind of adaptation, or narration, and, especially, a theatricality to it. One of the things I love about ‘Baskerville’ is that it has to be a play. There’s never going to be a movie of this play — I hope — because it relies on the fun in watching five actors tell this sprawling tale.”
In addition to Ludwig’s device of dramatizing Doyle’s novel with a cast of only five actors, “Baskerville” differs from other Holmes mysteries in that he is offstage for half of the play. This also intrigued Fox.
“It’s more Watson’s story than Holmes,” said Fox, who previously directed “Baskerville” in a co-production between the Cleveland Playhouse and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. “In the Ken Ludwig adaptation ... Watson is narrating, and everything he sees, we see. We go on Watson’s journey and he has to explore what it’s like to be the alpha when not the beta. He has to figure things out, and he’s called upon to be quite bold.
“I like also that both Watson and Holmes get out of their comfort zone, away from London. They are strangers in a strange land.”
Though Fox is working at Long Wharf for his first time, he’s no stranger to a thrust stage.
“When (we) did it last year in Ohio, it was a proscenium at Cleveland Playhouse,” Fox said. “Then we went to Cincinnati, where it’s a deep thrust, and a larger, more expansive footprint than Long Wharf has. It went really well in Cleveland, in proscenium style. That’s how I originally pictured it. (But) I didn’t really know how it would transfer in the new iteration, in the thrust. It worked, I think, even better.”
Not long after wrapping up the Cincinnati production, Gordon Edelstein, then Long Wharf’s artistic director, called Fox about staging a fresh production here. He didn’t have to ask twice.
“What’s really great is that this is a more intimate space with a cast of five, and the kind of theatrical sleight of hand that we want to do,” he said. “It’s epic, and yet an intimate story. I mean, it’s not ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ it’s not a cast of 20 actors. So the size of the space is ideal.”
Fox said that Long Wharf ’s intimate threequarters configuration “allows it to be a 3D pop-up book, I think.” The appetite in Fox’s voice suggested that he found great liberty working in such a performance space.
“It frees us to play the diagonals, and use the voms,” said Fox, referring to the two vomitories, or exit-entrances, allowing actors and crew to come and go onstage at the downstage corners.
“There’s also a fluidity in ‘Baskerville’ that, to me, should feel like a funhouse ride,” Fox said. “It’s a roller coaster and we should feel like we’re skiing downhill through these two acts. Using the voms to shoot actors and set pieces out like pinballs into and out of the space will help, I think, with that sense of flow.”
Though reunited with actor Brian Owen from their tandem productions of “Baskerville” in Ohio, Fox said that he finds it equally liberating to not simply remount the same show in New Haven.
“It’s fun to go back and play,” he said. “I’m interested in looking at the story fresh through the cast’s eyes and their dynamic and sense of humor. It’s another journey.”