One of the essential ingredients for a successful live comedy is audience involvement. I don’t mean audience members being brought up on stage; I mean pervasive and sustained audience laughter at whatever is happening on stage.
Unfortunately, on opening night of Black Sheep Theatre’s farce Sherlock Holmes – The Case of the Hansom Cab Killer, which is playing at The Gladstone until October 26, the audience was disengaged. Some of us laughed some of the time, but despite the best efforts of Chris Bange, Emily Windler and Brian Kuwabara, this comedy didn’t “click” with the audience.
The premise of the play – that Mrs. Hudson, Holmes’ housekeeper, not the dim-witted detective, is the brainiac who has solved all those murder mysteries – is a promising one.
And Bange, Windler and Kuwabara do fairly well in this farce, particularly given the rapid-fire costume changes required by the numerous characters they each play. (Kudos to the three stage managers, by the way. It must be quite a challenge to have all the props and costumes arranged properly.)
The humour ranges from slapstick to salacious (there are a lot of filthy double-entendres). It’s clear that Bange, who is also the author, and the other two cast members have watched a lot of Monty Python TV shows and Carry On movies. There are even charming references to Harpo Marx and Jacques Tati.
Despite all this, the audience didn’t laugh much.
According to the promotional material, this play, with the same cast, has been a “hilariously silly” “crowd-pleaser” in other cities. I’m not sure what its fate will be in Ottawa. Click here for information and tickets.
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