The games' afoot

When Pioneer Theatre Company's production of Anthony Dodge and Marcia Milgrom Dodge's stage version of Nicholas Meyer's "Sherlock Holmes & The West End Horror" opens this week, it's not just a regional premiere — it's only the third production of the play since it premiered in 2002 at a small theater in Sag Harbor, Long Island, and at the renowned Asolo Theatre in Sarasota, Fla.

The adventurous mystery puts Holmes and confidant Dr. John Watson up against such true-life luminaries as Oscar Wilde, Sigmund Freud, Bram Stoker and even Gilbert & Sullivan — all of whom are potential suspects in the West End murder of a theater critic.

Co-author Marcia Milgrom Dodge is guest directing the PTC production.

During a telephone interview this past week shortly after arriving in Salt Lake City, she noted that during one of the first read-through sessions with the script, during the fall of 2000, at the end of the reading an actress asked "if Sherlock Holmes really knew all these people."

The group reading the script was so charged up, apparently the young woman forgot that Holmes and Watson are fictional characters.

"What we hope (for the play) is that if you're a real theater lover, you are going to have a blast because of all your heroes coming to life on stage," said Dodge. "It's set in Victorian England, but it's still very much the way people are today."

And a large part of the fun for theatergoers will be seeing a cast of only seven performers playing nearly 35 characters between them. They'll swap costumes, accents and even gender in the blink of an eye.

Three of the cast come to Salt Lake City from previous productions of the play — Richard Watson played Sherlock Holmes in the Florida production and Mark Shanahan and Jennifer Waldman were, respectively, Oscar Wilde and the sultry, mysterious Jessie Rutland, in the Long Island premiere.

Joining them are Max Robinson as Watson, Craig Wroe (most recently seen in PTC's "Metamorphoses") as Lestrade, Kevin Doyle of Logan as impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte and guest artist Kurt Zischke as George Bernard Shaw, with local musician Steven Barlow as The Pianist.

All of the players except Barlow have an "etc." after each of their main characters' names. (Howard Millman, producing artistic director at the Asolo Theatre, noted in 2004 that "this play is . . . wonderful fun as the audience not only tries to solve the crime, but also to determine which of the players is playing whom from scene to scene.")