Arts Alive! podcast: Freefall’s Holmes and Watson

Eric Davis and Matthew McGee took some time away from playing Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson at freeFall Theatre to sit down and chat for the Arts Alive! podcast.

The show is Ken Ludwig’s Moriarty: A New Sherlock Holmes Adventure, and it’s onstage through Dec. 15.

Moriarty – let’s use the shorthand – is the followup to 2023’s Baskerville, one of the most successful shows in recent freeFall history. So when Ludwig created another comedic adaptation of the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, the theater’s powers-that-be leapt at the opportunity to, as somebody said in The Blues Brothers, get the band back together.

Davis, as freeFall’s founding artistic director, is the power-that-be. McGee is the Director of Marketing and Communications, and together they had seen and understood that audiences loved what they’d done with Baskerville.

As with its predecessor, Moriarty has a small cast – alongside Davis and McGee as the ever-intrepid detective and his sidekick, three actors – in this case, Kelly Pekar, Robert Teasdale and Sara Del Beato – play everybody else. A total of 40 characters between them.

It’s frantic, frenetic and fast-paced, and it’s very funny.

The two actors talk about how it was all assembled, costumes, cast chemistry and the rehearsal process (hint: a lot of laughs), as well as the theater’s ongoing Tandem Series and the plays to come in the New Year.

Click on the arrow to listen to the interview.