Sherlock Holmes and the Adventures of the Suicide Club at Theatre Downtown

      A good mystery is a little like a good strip tease. If too much is revealed too soon the magic is diluted....but when you do start revealing things you better have something juicy to hand over. It's a genre I've come to love - mysteries, that is - probably because where other forms of entertainment thrive on formula, the mystery, by definition, needs to be something you don't see coming.

      Sherlock Holmes and the Adventures of the Suicide Club, an Edgar award nominaed play by Jeffrey Hatcher currently running at Theatre Downtown, Orlando, comes through with flying colors on that front. Hatcher has combined Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's still-wildly-popular Sherlock Homes and Dr. Watson with Robert Louis Stevenson's mystery trilogy and comes up with a dark, witty, bizarre and complex piece that you don't have to be a mystery devotee to enjoy digging into. 

      Tim DeBaun is deliciously superior as Holmes, charming even in the miserable state we find him in at the start of the adventure and able to raise one eyebrow a good three feet above the other, a fabulous quality for a haughty detective to have. He's countered handsomely by Dean Walkulski as a perfectly affable, blustering friend-to-the-end John Watson and the rest of the characters are every bit as perfectly cast. It's wonderfully staged, too my particular favorite bit being the occasions where some characters, being talked about in third person, are seen behind a screen which gives them a filmy, far-away quality, perfect for the murky nature of the business at hand. 

      Suicide Club  is a dialog heavy show and you have to pay attention if you want to try to solve it by anywhere near the time Sherlock does - you can't be distracted by, say the fetish-y quality of the sexy magician's assistant's costume (yep, I noticed! It blended nicely with the already-steampunk air of the Victorian London setting, I thought). But production makes sticking with it easy. 
      The show runs through April 27, so you like a saucy little brain teaser no mystery here: click the link for tickets and the game is afoot.
     

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