OCTOBER 10, 2025 | ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT | By Margaret Freeman
“Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – Apt. 2B” is like the cheesiest sitcom you have ever seen. The play, which ran at the Fine Arts Center (FAC) from Sept. 18 to Oct. 5, is chock full of pratfalls, mystery and banter but ultimately left me feeling confused with a hefty dose of second-hand embarrassment.
Kate Hamill is an award-winning playwright known for adapting classic tales, especially Jane Austin’s novels, into modern comedies. According to her website, she focuses on creating feminist and female-centered plays that take a gender-bending lens to classic stories. As an avid fan of Hamill’s other work, specifically her Pride and Prejudice adaptation, I was eager to see this retelling of one of the most quintessential novels ever written.
“Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson” is one of Hamill’s newer plays, which premiered at the Kansas City Repertory Theater in 2022. The play is a modern adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the 1800s. It follows two women, Sherlock Holmes and Joan Watson, in post-COVID London, as they work to solve a variety of crimes: murder, blackmail and robbery. The four-person cast consists of an actress playing Holmes, an actress playing Watson and one male and one female actor playing a variety of eccentric characters.
The entire play is set around the living room of the women’s shared flat, filled with odd items, including a skeleton, many fencing epees and at one point, a bathtub full of blood. The central setting was reminiscent of a 90s sitcom with people wildly entering the scene through side doors and many of the most important conversations of the play happening on a couch centered on the stage. This gave the performance a light-hearted, comedic air right from the start. Every production I have seen at the FAC has had fabulous, intricate sets and in “Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson,” this was one of the play’s only saving graces.
Across the board, the acting in this play was way overdone. Every character always entered the scene with a level of energy that rarely matched the tone of what they were saying and the dramatic reactions were frankly embarrassing to watch. The only character where the overboard acting worked was Holmes. The intense physicality and dramatic line delivery align with Sherlock Holmes’ brooding, eccentric personality, as developed across all the adaptations. The larger-than-life character aligns with the deductive reasoning style of solving crimes that Sherlock Holmes is known for.
The overacting was punctuated by the fact that the plotline itself was disjointed and failed to hit the messages that it seemed to want to. There were multiple mysteries jammed into the 2-hour show, and after the detective and her assistant “solved” each one, I was left confused about what actually happened. So who did it? What was their motivation? Why does this matter? And the answer to all of those questions is overwhelmingly that I don’t know and don’t think the actors know either. This confusion paved the way for many other plot holes and a general feeling of disjointedness.
The play also attempted to convey many deeper messages, but consistently fell short. Themes of post-COVID social justice, independence and life advice were definitely present in the show but were weak and came off as cliché.
Between the issues with the script and the overwhelming (although not necessary) energy of the actors, “Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – Apt. 2B” fell short of my expectations for both Hamill and the FAC. I left feeling confused and disappointed, as it had the potential to be a truly amazing show. But perhaps modernizing one of the most beloved stories of the last 200 years is not “elementary, Watson.”