[ATTENDED: March 13, 2015] Baskerville
We saw ads for this show some time last year during a Princeton street festival. The folks at the McCarter booth really talked up the show and said our kids would love it. In recent days the play has been getting rave reviews. Needless to say we were pretty excited to go.
Well, the play was awesome. I’m not sure that the kids loved it. Clark said he liked parts of it but found the mystery a bit hard to follow. And Tabby was kind of scared by the dark scenes and loud noises. But everyone seemed to have a good time–even if it did end at 10PM.
And the play it self was really fantastic. Going in we knew literally nothing about the play except that it had something to do with Sherlock Holmes. I assumed it was the Hound of the Baskervilles story but I wasn’t sure if there was a twist on it at all.
And I certainly didn’t know anything about the way the play was structured. In the brief write up in the booklet it seemed like the story might have a meta- component. And it did, but not in the way I expected. For the meta component was that they really played up the constraints of the theater and wound up making jokes about the stage and how actors often play multiple roles. For example, they said things like “that rabbit” and then a stuffed and mounted rabbit would wheel across the stage. Or that he needed his hat and a trap door would open and a hat would be thrown to him. And the hilarious way the flowers arrived was outstanding–I’m still not exactly sure how they did it. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 