Sherlock Holmes and the 12 Days of Christmas review – Lloyd Webber and Rice reunite for festive felonies

By Mark Lawson · The Guardian Culture

Birmingham Rep Humphrey Ker and David Reed’s witty thriller blends Victorian sleuthing, meta gags and new songs by the great musical-theatre duo A serial killer working through the alphabet (Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders) or Catholicism’s list of gravest sins (David Fincher’s Seven) gives a plot momentum and audiences the pleasure of anticipating who or what might be next. And such is enjoyably the case in Birmingham’s Christmas show, where a seasonally lethal bad actor (in the policing rather than theatrical sense) is wiping out people in line with the 18th-century song The 12 Days of Christmas. While maids a-milking, swans a-swimming and the rest might plausibly be found in English crime fiction’s favourite setting of a village, co-writers Humphrey Ker and David Reed set the deadly dozen in Victorian theatreland, where a performer embodying one of the song’s elements (Mother Goose, Swan Lake etc) is threatened each evening. Continue reading...