The producer of a new Sherlock Holmes play is investigating a path to the West End and Broadway, enlisting a creative team led by director Daniel Evans to stage an original tale of the master detective, “Sherlock Holmes.”
Under the tutelage of young producer Antonio R. Marion, who’s been on the production team of shows including “Evita” on Broadway and “The Sunshine Boys” on the West End, “Sherlock Holmes” has tapped Evans and a group of designers that includes set designer Christopher Oram (“Red,” “Wolf Hall”), lighting designer Hugh Vanstone (“Matilda”) and costume designer William Ivey Long (“Cinderella,” “Hairspray,” “The Producers”). Together they’ll stage a new play co-written by Rachel Wagstaff, whose theatrical adaptation of the novel “Birdsong” played the West End, and novelist Duncan Abel (“The Way Home”).
Welsh actor-director Evans will be familiar to Broadway audiences for his Tony-nominated turn in the 2008 Broadway revival of “Sunday in the Park with George.” Recently named the artistic director of Chichester Festival Theater, Evans spent close to seven years as artistic director of London’s Sheffield Theaters. His production of “Show Boat” is currently running on the West End.
The storyline of “Sherlock Holmes,” one of a string of Holmes-themed Broadway shows stretching back to 1899, is billed as a “mystery within a mystery” that delves into the detective’s past. Marion said the goal was to add something to the Holmes mythos that audiences hadn’t yet seen, and to do it in a way that’s inherently theatrical, incorporating Victorian-era stage effects.
Scaled to about the size of a “War Horse” or a “Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” “Sherlock Holmes” is targeting a U.K. regional tryout in the spring of 2017 prior to a West End run. If all goes well, a Broadway production would follow thereafter.
