Sherlock Holmes and the 12 Days of Christmas review – Lloyd Webber and Rice come together for festive whores | stage

A A serial killer working through the alphabet (Agatha Christie’s ABC Murders) or Catholicism’s list of the most serious sins (David Fincher’s Seven) gives momentum to the plot and gives viewers the pleasure of anticipating who or what might be next.

This is amusingly the case in a Birmingham Christmas show, where a seasonally murderous bad actor (in the police sense, not the theatrical sense) annihilates people in keeping with the 18th-century song “The 12 Days of Christmas.” While the maids are milking, the swans are swimming, and the rest could plausibly be found in the favored setting of an English crime-fiction village, co-writers Humphry Kerr and David Reid set The Fatal Dozen in a Victorian theatre, where a performer embodying one of the elements of the song (Mother Goose, Swan Lake, etc.) is threatened each evening.

This era allows for the investigation of chaos by Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, played by the authors respectively, with Kerr and Reed seeming to channel the tall, short and sweet dynamic of John Cleese and Andrew Sachs in Fawlty Towers.

The show also impressively delivers a Christmas gift that only the stingiest of theatergoers will resist – a great musical drama duo reuniting. After Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber separated professionally in the early 1980s, they wrote Cricket (1986), a special “little musical” for Elizabeth II’s 60th birthday, a new song for the 1996 film Evita, and compiled the score and libretto for Arlen and Harburg’s “The Wizard of Oz” for Lloyd Webber’s 2011 show. But the seven new songs are here, plus an assortment of the composer’s instrumental repertoire, “Variations.” (1978), her most significant resume, facilitated by producers including two of Rice’s children.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that collaborations will feel nostalgic. The show’s urchins and street dealers intertwine historically and in a music hall-style score with the Victorian setting of The Likes of Us, Rice Lloyd Webber’s 1965 premiere about Dr. Barnardo that was not presented until 2005. The funny, knowing tone of the lyrics (Rice clearly knows his Conan Doyle) is reminiscent of cricket. As with this show, Sherlock’s songs will be viewed as curiosities for Rice and Lloyd Webber. The best of these are The Dead of Winter, an atmospheric mix of Christmas and murder references, and puns scattered like spilled rice, and Houses Are Not Holmes, a Watson solo song poignantly performed by Reed.

The screenplay, enthusiastically written by Philip Breen and Becky Hope-Palmer, includes a gentle, anachronistic satire against sexism amid many meta-jokes about Birmingham’s football rivals, Aston Villa, crime fiction, and theatrical devices. In Sharp Ensemble, Helena Wilson’s rival private investigator, Athena Faversham, and Queen Victoria, played by Deborah Tracy, excel.

This is a big moment for Rice: This week, I saw the Broadway revival of Chess, his 1986 collaboration with the Abba songwriters, which was musically brilliant but story-wise muddled. On the contrary, this project has a strong narrative from Kerr and Reid with subtle notes from the most profitable duo in British musical theatre.