The Revenge of Sherlock Holmes – Rehearsals

Another day, another musical.  And to think, a few years ago I hadn’t lit a single musical.  Now I’ve done… more than I can comfortably remember.  Oh god the triplets.  Oh god the key changes.  Oh god the sense that there isn’t enough heat proof blue gel in the world…

Anyway.  What should interest you about all of this, is that of the musicals I’ve lit, I haven’t actually talked about any of them on this blog.  Being as it is, my wordy blog rather than my shiny lighty blog.  (There isn’t, by the way, a shiny lighty blog, because lighting designers are famously non-communicative unless with other lighting designers.)

But!  I am gonna give The Revenge of Sherlock Holmes a mention because, frankly, I trust the guys who are doing it.  This is the same production team who did Jekyll and Hyde last year, and while I still maintain that rhyming ‘red’ with ‘red’ was perhaps a little thesaurus-light, the production was stonking.  Absolutely stonking.  And if they want to take a musical about Sherlock Holmes and transpose it to Hoxton Hall (authentic East End music hall in Hackney, what is where I is from) then oddly, I’m going to cheer them all the way.  Not least because I’m lighting it.

And there’s a lot to light.  An awesome set (albeit one that limits my backlight options, growl…), epic costumes, lots of smoke machines for reasons which will become apparent, magic, mayhem and a skeleton who I personally think we should call Doris.  And oh yes… a cast and a director who’s stated ambition is to have the audience riveted from the word go and who, based on what I’ve seen so far, might actually achieve it…

And hell!  Even if a rip-roaring Victorian music hall experience isn’t quite your cuppa tea, did I mention the shiny toys and the magic?  Hoxton Hall was built in the 1860s (at the same time the Horatio Lyle books are set) and if it’s possible to bring the house down with exuberance alone, then I think this production might just do it.