Down drops the song sheet and the penultimate number in this new musical murder mystery is – no spoiler – The Twelve Days of Christmas. A packed Saturday matinee audience sings along lustily. It’s a genuinely joyous moment. Theatregoers of retiring nature may be relieved to learn that this is the only instance of audience participation in this music hall influenced, Victorian pop-up theatre-style production.
The other half dozen songs have all been written for the show by the venerable duo Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber. In what is something of a family affair, this Sherlock Holmes spoof has been originated and developed by younger Rices, Donald and Eva, for their parents’ company Heartaches Ltd.
The Rice-Lloyd Webber numbers don’t propel the action but, dashingly delivered by the six-piece live band, they do bring colour and texture to a patchy script by writers Humphrey Ker and David Reed (perhaps best known for their The Penny Dreadfuls Present ... series of “very silly gothic Victoriana” on BBC’s Radio 4), who also play Holmes and Watson, respectively, giving the relationship a sub-Basil Fawlty-Manuel vibe.
To Holmes’s delight, the murderer is following a song-inspired sequence: drummer, piper, lord, lady, milkmaid and a Swan Lake ballerina are all now defunct. “The crime is immaterial,” he sings, what matters is that “it’s serial”. “The game’s afoot!” chorus Holmes and Watson, Mrs Hudson and Inspector Lestrade. Who will be next?
Directed by Phillip Breen with Becky Hope-Palmer, the promising plotline rambles its way through over-long scenes spattered with entertaining sketches – including a “deduce off” between Holmes and a rival detective Miss Faversham (sharp and sassy Helena Wilson) and an at-speed synopsis of Wagner’s Ring cycle. The route followed is visually striking: Baker Street, the city morgue, backstage at a West End theatre and over London’s rooftops (Mark Bailey’s designs). In the cast of 13, John Kearns’s gruff Lestrade, Susan Harrison’s uncouth urchin and Margaret Cabourn-Smith’s sprightly Mrs Hudson hit all the right notes.
Sherlock Holmes and the 12 Days of Christmas is at Birmingham Rep until 18 January