I Can't...I Have Rehearsal

See, this is what happens to actors.  They get involved in a show and they vanish from the face of the earth.  I wanted to make sure that I kept this up...writing at least every other day if not every day and what happens?  Three weeks without an update.

I've been cast in the Coronado Playhouse production of Sherlock Holmes' Excellent Adventure.  I'm playing Sherlock, which came as a bit of a surprise as mentioned previously.  I've got a lot of homework to do for this one.  Since it's a parody, it's important to be up on all of the Sherlock trivia to establish the baseline.  Thus, all of the jokes will make sense.  I've never read any of the stories and while I've heard a couple of BBC Radio adaptations, I've not really had too much experience with Holmes.

I've been looking through online videos of Jeremy Brett since he's considered one of the definitive Holmeses out there.  Unfortunately, the first one I saw was "The Dying Detective" which has Brett going a bit over the top.  The large-scale plot is the same:  A young woman of breeding has come to Holmes to help her save her house from the clutches of an evil relative who is going to put her out.  In "The Dying Detective," it's her husband's cousin who happens to be a doctor specializing in the treatment of rare diseases.  He's seemingly killed his cousin and due to a quirk in the will, the estate goes to him.  Holmes, in an attempt to suss the confession out, pretends to have the same disease and has an hysterical fever fit, berating Watson as a horrible physician.

Well, I've been playing Holmes a bit over the top, too, and the director has been on me about that.  "Yeah, but the episode I saw is precisely the way I've been playing him!"  Yeah, yeah, but that's not quite what we want.  So, I'm going through others.  From what I can see, Brett played Holmes as understanding that he had a reputation and while it wasn't all false, it wasn't all true, either.  Underneath, he has a strong understanding of human interaction and while he remains detached from the expression of emotion, he understands that others need it and is not above providing it when they require it.  At the end of "The Dying Detective," the daughter of the woman goes to thank Holmes and you can see that she's a bit scared of him.  Holmes remains his formal self and then, ever so quickly, flashes her a grin.

There's also a fair amount of physical work in this.  We're having a minimal set so the train sequence is done mostly via mime.  At one point, Holmes and Watson have to squeeze into the toilet, so there's a fair amount of "man in a box" going on.

And then there's the accent.  I do a fairly decent British accent (having just done a couple British plays recently, No Sex Please, We're British! and Betrayal), but it's always nice to have more training.  Our coach for this show is being exact with me.  Apparently, I'm a bit nasal which, in British circles, tends more towards buffoonish characters.  I've got a good grasp of the form of the vowels and the peculiarities of pronunciation compared to American English ("ad-VER-tiss-ment" rather than "ad-ver-TIZE-ment"), but it's a question of placement.  Twenty years of musical theatre training of singing through my nose is catching up to me.

We open on October 30th.  It should be fun.