Don’t go looking for some great whodunnit mystery in Arizona Theatre Company‘s season finale, “Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – Apt. 2B,” on stage at the Temple of Music and Art.
There won’t be any “ahhh-ha!” epiphanies midway into the two-hour performance where you think you’ve put together all the pieces of playwright Kate Hamill’s multilayered storyline.
There are far too many dots to connect:
Was it the widow of Victim No. 1 found with slit wrists in the “Otel” bathtub?
The smarmy, long-haired billionaire Elliot Monk from Texas, donning skintight skinny jeans and a bare chest?
Or maybe it was Irene Adler, the seductress con artist who’s blackmailing Monk with an incriminating video?
The plot hilariously twists and turns as character stories inexplicably intertwine, and even if you were keeping a mental scorecard, you’d lose your place.
Solving the mystery is not really the point of “Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – Apt. 2B,” which opened Friday night at ATC’s longtime Tucson home.
It’s more about the journey.
Joan Watson is an American doctor in London, trying to find herself after losing everything — her profession, her husband and her perfect life — to the pandemic and ends up sharing a flat with Sherlock Holmes, a singularly-focused “consulting detective” with hyper-keen observational skills and questionable social skills. Watson unwittingly gets roped into becoming Holmes’ assistant as she goes about solving seemingly unrelated murders that point toward Holmes and her little black book of criminal secrets.
The story is thin but the humor is thick, a point Director Marcia Milgrom Dodge smartly emphasized from the opening scene where the real Sherlock Holmes (the very funny Aaron Cammack in one of several roles he played including Inspector Lestrade) emerges on stage mistakenly thinking he was going to solve a great mystery for Friday night’s opening night audience.
Regina Fernandez’s Ms. Watson is a vulnerable shell of the pre-COVID doctor who was once regarded as a medical superstar at home until she’s forced to stand up to Ms. Holmes. Kelen Coleman, effecting a pretty terrific British accent, was rigidly old-school Scotland Yard investigator. Instead of “Googling” as her living-in-the-21st-century roommate suggests, she pulls out a giant magnifying glass when the two women climbed into the “Otel” tub with the dead guy (played by a blowup doll).
Dodge had the women tangled up with the victim, who at one point flopped on top of Ms. Watson, pinning her in the tub as Ms. Holmes went off to look for more clues. When she returns, Holmes folds the dead guy’s legs to free Watson in one of the evening’s most hilarious scenes.
Dodge also lets the audience in on the joke as the characters react with exaggeration to the iconic dun dun duun! plot twist sound effects.
The play’s lone poignant moment came when Fernandez’s Watson told the story of how the pandemic stole her joy; it was the only time during that the Temple was silent.
Fernandez and Coleman were terrifically funny, but some of the biggest laughs at Friday’s opening night went to Cammack, in his final appearance as ATC’s 2024-25 resident artist, and the brilliantly funny Michelle Duffy, playing the keys-fumbling, Nervous Nellie landlord Mrs. Hudson and the dominatrix-like escort/con artist Irene Adler.
“Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – Apt. 2B” continues at the Temple of Music and Art, 330 S. Scott Ave., through June 7. For tickets and times, visit atc.org.
