I attended “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” performance by the Aquila Theater Company at Stockton’s Performing Arts Center on October 2nd, 2015. This performance brought three of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories about Sherlock Holmes to life: “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”, “The Adventure of the Yellow Face”, and “A Scandal in Bohemia”.
The Aquila Theater Company made the production fun and enjoyable to watch. In order to keep the lengthy production interesting, they embellished the performance with jokes and other twists while remaining true to the source material. One interesting twist was that the iconic character of Sherlock Holmes was played by a woman dressed in men’s clothing. Even more interestingly, the other characters referred to Sherlock with feminine pronouns. She did a great job portraying Holmes’s eccentric and sociopathic personality. It was especially impressive when she played the violin just like Holmes did in the original stories.
The actors did a great job, especially since they were entertaining for around three hours. The only negative side of the production was that there were a lot of details that the audience had to pay attention to in order to understand what was going on. Consequently, it was hard to keep that kind of attention for such a long period of time. This could be the source of negative feedback, even though I thought they did their best to keep the audience’s attention with comedic relief.
Overall, I really enjoyed this performance. I had read “A Scandal in Bohemia” a long time ago and I think they did a great job bringing it to life. I thought their jokes were pretty funny, and that it was even funnier how they performed stories where Holmes was unable to solve the case. I would recommend this production if the company decides to come back to Stockton and perform it again.