Share This Article
Sherlock Holmes has lost his nemesis, his purpose and his nerve. Then a grown-up Tiny Tim walks through the door and asks him to find out who killed Ebenezer Scrooge.
That is the setup for “A Sherlock Carol,” the final show of Twin Lakes Playhouse’s 2026 season. It opens Nov. 6 and runs through Nov. 22, with Friday and Saturday shows at 7 p.m. and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Tickets are $15 at tlpmh.org or through the box office at 870-424-0444.
Director Anne Johnson calls the play a mashup of Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. It is a newer script, and one she said most local audiences will not have seen before.
“It’s not real well known yet, but I think it’s getting out there,” Johnson said. “It’s something different besides just ‘A Christmas Carol’ or ‘A Christmas Story,’ the same old Christmas ones over and over again. This adds a little more mystery to it.”
The play is the work of Mark Shanahan, a New York actor, director and playwright whose stage credits include Broadway’s “The 39 Steps.” He is now artistic director of the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut.
Shanahan has said the idea came to him backstage. He was acting in “The Weir,” a Conor McPherson ghost story, alongside actor Drew McVety, and the two would talk in the dressing room during the final minutes of each performance. Shanahan told McVety he had a play in his head he could write for him, and McVety told him to go write it.
Shanahan wrote it 10 pages at a time and mailed each batch to McVety, who eventually took the script to producers. After a pandemic delay, “A Sherlock Carol” opened off-Broadway at New World Stages in November 2021 with McVety as Holmes. It returned to New York the following holiday season, played a London run at the Marylebone Theatre and has since spread to regional and community theaters across the country.
Shanahan has said he first read “The Hound of the Baskervilles” under the covers with a flashlight at age 11 and never let go of Holmes. He had already written his own stage version of “A Christmas Carol,” and he built the new play as a sequel of sorts, borrowing ideas from “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” the only Holmes story Doyle set at Christmas.
What drew him was the clash of worldviews. Holmes is a man of pure reason who has no use for ghosts, while Scrooge is a man whose whole life was remade by them. Putting the two in the same room, Shanahan has said, was like inviting friends from different social circles to the same dinner party and hoping they got along.
The story picks up years after Dickens left off. Scrooge has lived out a long, generous life, and Holmes has just lost Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. The play opens on a twist of Dickens’ famous first line: Moriarty is dead, to begin with.
“Who am I without Moriarty? I don’t have a nemesis anymore,” Johnson said of the detective’s state of mind. “He’s just down in the dumps.”
Enter Tiny Tim, now Dr. Cratchit, who believes Scrooge’s death was no accident. As Holmes works the case, Scrooge returns as a ghost and leads him to the cemetery, showing him past, present and future the way the spirits once did for Scrooge himself. Characters from Holmes’ old cases come back to haunt him too, and Johnson said the script is full of Easter eggs for anyone who knows the original.
Vance Jones plays Holmes. Johnson said the role keeps him on stage almost the entire night, with monologues that run a full page as Holmes explains to Cratchit exactly how he knows who he is.
“He has a billion lines to learn,” Johnson said. “He said, ‘I didn’t realize there was a million.’ He’s hardly ever off stage.”
Mike Horberg, who played Hercule Poirot in the Playhouse’s “Murder on the Orient Express” this summer, is Scrooge. “He’s playing that part really well,” Johnson said.
Cratchit took a longer road to casting. Johnson first gave the part to a woman because no men turned out for auditions, then two showed up, and the original actor left for Denver to care for family. Josh Holley, who had worked backstage and taken walk-on parts at the Playhouse, stepped into the role.
“He’s a young guy that hasn’t been a lot of times on stage,” Johnson said. “But he’s doing really well.”
Adam Dye, also fresh off “Orient Express,” plays Dr. Watson. Johnson said it is a smaller part than fans of the duo might expect, since Holmes sends Watson away early in the play. Four narrators carry the story between scenes before the action drops into the characters’ own voices.
The company also includes FE Quiles, Jenny Horberg, Kyria Johnson, Nancy Leone, Andrea McInnis, Patty Kotlicky, Robert Manning, Olivia Potter, Willow Gage and Luke Ramsey. Laura Chandler is assistant director and Karen Maupin is musical director.
The script demands a lot of scene changes, and Johnson was still building them last week. Rotating panels left over from “Orient Express” show a London street on one side. Turn them once and they become a cemetery, turn them again and they become the wall of Scrooge’s home.
The play is written so that Scrooge simply appears “from elsewhere,” Johnson said, so she built the set with open sides that let actors slip on and off unseen. Holmes’ sitting room is furnished largely with yard sale finds, including three small antique tables she picked up for $3 apiece.
“Every time I go to yard sales or church yard sales, I find stuff,” she said. “It works perfect for the shows.”
Jim Brown Company is the production’s main sponsor, joined by Dr. Otis Warr and Dr. Shelley Warr. Johnson said the Warrs’ return to the Playhouse came out of a doctor’s visit.
Johnson said she was in Dr. Warr’s office this summer when she noticed the exam room was lined with posters from Playhouse shows her friend Deb Smith had appeared in, including “On Golden Pond” and “Always… Patsy Cline.”
“I said, this is just the right room,” Johnson said. “I said, how come you’re not involved in the Playhouse anymore? He said, well, I kind of just got away from it.”
When the appointment wrapped up and Warr asked if she had any questions, Johnson had one. “Why don’t you get back into the play? You can help sponsor my new play,” she said. Warr had sponsored several productions in years past and agreed to come back.
The run wraps up the weekend before Thanksgiving, which Johnson sees as an advantage. She said past shows that ran through the holiday drew good crowds.
“What do you do after your Thanksgiving dinner?” she said. “Thursday night’s dinner, then what are we doing Friday and Saturday?”
This year, the answer at the Playhouse is a murder mystery with ghosts.
