Holmes mystery ‘Hound’ finds funny bone

July 27, 2010|Louise Kennedy, Globe Staff

CAMBRIDGE — The game is afoot, and what a game it is: a two-act romp through “The Hound of the Baskervilles,’’ adapted with surprising fidelity, except that it’s all played for laughs. Who knows if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have approved, but good-humored devotees of his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, surely will.

Steven Canny and John Nicholson’s spoofy adaptation played to acclaim and applause at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox last fall, and now Thomas Derrah has mounted a new production at Central Square Theater. He’s enlisted his longtime American Repertory Theater comrade Remo Airaldi to play Holmes — physically an odd choice, especially when the lean and saturnine Bill Mootos is right there next to him onstage, playing . . . Dr. Watson? Wouldn’t it have been logical to switch these two parts?

But the casting makes more sense once you see that the actor playing Holmes is also called upon to impersonate a pompous and portentous butler, the butler’s buxom wife, the mysterious Peruvian lepidopterist Stapleton, and, most unforgettably, Stapleton’s screeching, tangoing “sister.’’ Airaldi’s clownish physicality and simpering mien are spot-on for all these parts — especially that sister, with her long braids and swirling lace fans.

Mootos, meanwhile, acquits himself admirably as the less-than-perspicacious Watson, with sure comic timing and a particular gift for displaying astonished innocence. The two veterans are joined onstage by a talented rising senior at Boston Conservatory, Trent Mills, who dives with aplomb into the roles of a Dartmoor peasant, a hysterical actor, and a whole fistful of Baskervilles.

Much of the fun comes from watching these three pros dash nimbly from role to role, ripping off Mallory Frers’s appropriate costumes midflight and throwing on a beard or wig. The conceit is that they’re members of a small-potatoes traveling theatrical troupe — a conceit that’s enhanced by Carlos Aguilar’s deliberately two-dimensional set, complete with rotating panels and flat plywood “boulders.’’ And the script adds a nice layer to the basic story by having the itinerant actors grow increasingly spooked by the uncanny tale they’re performing — and by the sinister events that seem to be taking place both onstage and in the wings.