Sherlock Holmes is what journalists call “an evergreen,” a story that’s timeless. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s four novels and 56 short stories about the brilliant detective are still going strong, and new Holmes movies and TV episodes continue to appear. The famous deerstalker cap is also frequently fitted to new heads: Holmes’s teenaged sister now has a movie series of her own, and there are Holmes animated tales, board games, video games, and even a Holmes rock concept album. The Globe has produced its own share of Holmes stage plays, most recently nine years ago in this very theatre, with Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville.

Tonight’s play, the witty and beguiling Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – Apt. 2B, is the latest and, to my mind, the freshest entrant in the Holmes adaptation canon. Playwright Kate Hamill is a phenomenon. One of the most-produced writers for the stage in America, she specializes in blowing the dust off of literary classics and injecting new and often modern energies into them. Her plays honor their source materials even as they open new doors to them, doors through which new audiences can discover revered works of fiction as if they were intended for the 21st-century American theatre all along. Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, Hawthorne, Alcott, and others have found themselves in collaborations across time with Hamill, and witnessing those creative encounters is always a joy.

With Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson, that joy has a second component: a sense of delayed gratification. Hamill was set to join the Globe family in spring 2020, when her stage adaptation of Little Women was scheduled to appear in our largest venue. The production had completed four weeks of studio rehearsals and had just moved to the stage on March 12, when Governor Newsom announced California’s statewide shutdown. It’s been a regret for everyone at the theatre that we weren’t able to reconstitute that production after the pandemic receded, and so we feel a special sense of delight that, four years later, we finally get to introduce Kate Hamill’s writing to our supporters.

Globe audiences will discover a playwright who values humor and bright comic invention even as she simultaneously plumbs some deep human themes. Her Holmes—a non-male, millennial, steampunk-inflected genius—is bored at the lack of exciting cases to solve, but this boredom turns out to be a manifestation of another malady entirely: her lack of connection to other human beings. Hamill knows that for a savant like Holmes, genius is both a gift and a burden. That Holmes is always five chess moves ahead of everyone else on earth makes her special, but it also isolates her. Hamill wonders whether, buried deep in the action of bringing justice to victims of crime, Holmes might also find a sense of empathy that’s been elusive even to the world’s greatest puzzle solver. It’s in the depth and power of Holmes’s yearning humanity that Hamill finds the real engine of her play, and she gives us the gift of understanding even as she makes us laugh. That’s an extraordinary combination.

It’s always a pleasure to have the sparkling work of Globe Resident Artist James Vásquez on our stage, and to note with special interest that for this production, he has assembled a creative team composed entirely of San Diego–based artists. That’s a point of pride for the Globe, and I’m thrilled to welcome this group and to congratulate them on a beautiful piece of work.
Thanks for coming. Enjoy the show.

Barry Edelstein is the Erna Finci Viterbi Artistic Director of The Old Globe.

Any feedback on tonight's show or any of the Globe's work?

Email Barry at HiBarry@TheOldGlobe.org and he'll get back to you!