Sherlock Holmes and the 12 Days of Christmas review – Lloyd Webber and Rice reunite for festive felonies

1 week ago 15

A serial killer working through the alphabet (Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders) or Catholicism’s list of gravest sins (David Fincher’s Seven) gives a plot momentum and audiences the pleasure of anticipating who or what might be next.

And such is enjoyably the case in Birmingham’s Christmas show, where a seasonally lethal bad actor (in the policing rather than theatrical sense) is wiping out people in line with the 18th-century song The 12 Days of Christmas. While maids a-milking, swans a-swimming and the rest might plausibly be found in English crime fiction’s favourite setting of a village, co-writers Humphrey Ker and David Reed set the deadly dozen in Victorian theatreland, where a performer embodying one of the song’s elements (Mother Goose, Swan Lake etc) is threatened each evening.

The era allows the mayhem to be investigated by Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, played respectively by the authors, with Ker and Reed seeming to channel the tall-short, wild-mild dynamic of John Cleese and Andrew Sachs in Fawlty Towers.

The show also impressively offers a Christmas gift that only the most curmudgeonly theatregoers would resist – a great musical drama duo reuniting. After Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber professionally separated in the early 1980s, they wrote Cricket (1986), a private “musicalette” for the 60th birthday of Elizabeth II, a new song for the 1996 movie of Evita, and bulked out the score and libretto of Arlen & Harburg’s The Wizard of Oz for Lloyd Webber’s 2011 staging. But the seven new songs here, plus a variation on one of the composer’s instrumental suite Variations (1978), are their most substantial resumption, facilitated by the producers including two of Rice’s children.

Sherlock Holmes and the 12 Days of Christmas at Birmingham Rep.

Perhaps inevitably, the collaboration feels nostalgic. The show’s urchins and street traders overlap historically and in a music hall-style score with the Victorian setting of The Likes of Us, the 1965 Rice-Lloyd Webber debut show about Dr Barnardo that was not performed until 2005. The in-jokey and knowing tone of the lyrics (Rice clearly knows his Conan Doyle) recalls Cricket. As with that show, the Sherlock songs will be regarded as a Rice and Lloyd Webber curiosity. The best of them are The Dead of Winter, an atmospheric mashup of yuletide and homicidal references, and, scattering puns like spilled rice, Houses Are Not Holmes, a Watson solo affectingly delivered by Reed.

The script, staged with gusto by Phillip Breen and Becky Hope-Palmer, includes nice anachronistic jibes against sexism amid numerous meta jests about Birmingham’s football rivals Aston Villa, crime fiction and theatrical devices. In a sharp ensemble, Helena Wilson’s rival private detective Athena Faversham and Deborah Tracey’s Queen Victoria excel.

This is a big moment for Rice: this week, I saw the Broadway revival of Chess, his 1986 collaboration with Abba songwriters, which was musically glorious but confused in storyline. Conversely, this venture has strong narrative from Ker and Reed with light grace notes from British musical theatre’s most profitable pair.