Holmes & Watson
By Jeffrey Hatcher
Directed by J. Barrett Cooper
Constellation Stage & Screen
Waldron Auditorium
September 7th - September 24th, 2023
Production Team:
Scenic Design: Seth Howard
Costume Design: Guy Charles Clark
Lighting Design: Jennifer Fok
Sound Design & Original Music: Brandon Reed
About The Play
Sherlock Holmes is dead. Or so it is assumed. The world knows the great detective went over the falls at Reichenbach with his nemesis Professor Moriarty. But as Holmes’ body was never retrieved, a number of frauds, fakes and charlatans have come forward since to lay claim to his identity, and it falls to Dr. Watson to disprove them. A telegram arrives informing Watson that three men, each claiming to be Holmes, have been committed to a remote asylum off the coast of Scotland. Now Watson must discover if one of the mad men is the real Sherlock Holmes all while trying to solve another mystery.
We have our first of three impersonators claiming to be Sherlock Holmes. Each one tells their own variation of the Reichenback falls incident. We have a cello play a quick flourish to get us into the story as we hear an ambient tone that conveys a darker feeling and an ominous sense. As Moriarty appears we hear the same vocab established earlier with the violin and sounds of the waterfall. As he leaves the stage, the violin plays him off leaving just the ambient tone until the story finishes.
Escaping Prison
After the story of what happened to The Woman, we learn that Dr Evans along with an Inspector planned to use her as bait to lure the suspect to the asylum. Thinking one of the three impersonators is the suspect, they made it know The Woman was on the island.
We hear the pouring rain outside of the asylum, followed by a buzzer signalling that someone has arrived. The rain transitions to being full fidelity and surrounding the audience. We hear the sound of the lights buzzing and cut out. We hear the three impersonators let out of their cells as an ambient low frequency drone conveys a sense of dread. Finally in the darkness we hear a gunshot as the inspector falls and cries out it was Sherlock Holmes….but which one.
Photos taken courtesy of Icarus Photography
Working with Barrett on this production was a great experience. Right away he mentioned that he wanted me to fully embrace theatricality and to embrace the stories and recollections that our characters have throughout. We jump back and forth between the present and the characters telling us what they remember the night Holmes fell from the waterfall. When we hear these stories we will see them on stage or have them featured silhouetted in the background. These moments are to be accompanied by sound design. In addition, when we are in the present, not being afraid to show how off-putting and bizarre some of the characters and the asylum are.
To accomplish this, I was heavily inspired by thriller and dramatic films such as some of the Sherlock films and TV shows. Whenever we went into these story telling moments, I treated them like memory plays and made use of ambient tones, as well as aural textures reminiscent of horror or shocker films. Using textures that sounded like a waterphone or stringed instruments being played in unfamiliar ways to elicit a creepy atmosphere. I also layered in soundscapes such as rain or waterfalls when we discuss the locations to help the audience place where we are. For moments like the fight between Moriarty and Holmes I had an area microphone hanging from the grid close to where the scene was blocked and fed that into a reverb bus on the Midas M32. I then routed that back through the PA and it made their dialogue feel more ghostly and haunting.
The music I wrote for underscoring and for scene changes was also inspired by those same Sherlock films. I used a mostly orchestral solo instrumentation with the occasional synth layer. Using only one player per instrument rather than a full orchestra helped made it feel more isolated. We really embraced the theatricality and wanted to get under the audience skin and made them feel unnerved.
Top Of Show
From the get go, we want to immediately establish high stakes and tension. We have a driving orchestral piece that I wrote that features a driving cello, but then the rest of the strings come in to really guide us into the show. We go right into a low ambient drone that conveys a sense of unease as we meet Watson. He lays out the stakes of our story. He’s received a letter that there are 3 suspects claiming to be Sherlock Holmes, who went missing after his encounter with Moriarty. A train whisks him away as we transition to the asylum in a thunderstorm.
The Sound Design
Moriarty at Reichenback
As we meet our first Sherlock impersonator, we establish the first of many times that we recall the incident of Sherlock versus Moriarty at the Reichenback waterfall. We are in the prison with pouring rain heard outside the windows. As the story begins we hear an ambient tone that conveys a feeling of being unnerved. As Moriarty is mentioned he appears upstage in silhouette accompanied by a violin playing an eerie note. As he goes away a different note. This is the aural vocabulary we will use each time we hear this story.
Holmes Interview 1
Holmes Interview 2
With our second Sherlock impersonator, he’s a bit more unhinged and chaotic, but tells a much clearer story than the first one. The sound design reflects this. We have the cello flourish to get us into the story. We have the same Moriarty violin intro and outro, however this time the ambient tone is perhaps darker in tone. I also added an aural texture created by a waterphone to get an unnerving feeling since this character is more insane. This time as the story ends, when they jump into the waterfall, we hear a pre-recorded scream of Moriarty echo throughout the theatre. The story has more details to it, therefore so does the soundscape.
Woman Flashback
We later learn that the nurse helping Dr. Evans the psychiatric ward of the asylum, is actually a woman that is very close to Sherlock Holmes. A murderer suspected to be one of the three impersonators was trying to get close to her. They decide to hypnotize her to uncover the truth of what happened to her and perhaps get clues to who the suspect is.
As they put her under a hypnotic spell. we hear an ambient tone conveying a liminal type space. As we venture into different sections of her story cellos play different flourishes to convey traveling in time. Eventually we land at the masquerade where she was hired to steal from a man. They fake a fire and we hear the crowd disperse, which gives her a chance to make her move. Unfortunately, she is discovered and beaten with a bat. Next thing she knows she can’t remember a thing. A cello plays us out of her story as we return to reality.