The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey Is Staging One of the Funniest Theatrical Experiments in American Playwriting This Summer

The premise of Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery is also its central theatrical joke, and it is announced in the production’s own marketing with the directness that the play itself embodies: five actors, forty characters, one unsolvable mystery. The joke is not in the impossibility of the task but in the commitment to attempting it — five performers cycling through more than forty distinct roles, with their own costumes, accents, physicalities, and comic logic, in a production that depends on its ensemble’s ability to execute split-second transformations with the kind of precision that makes them simultaneously look absolutely effortless and absolutely ridiculous. The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey opens its production of Baskerville at the F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre on the Drew University campus in Madison on July 11, running through August 2, with tickets priced from $45 to $85.

Ken Ludwig is the right playwright to have written this particular play for reasons that extend beyond the comic instinct that the premise requires. He holds degrees from Harvard, Haverford College, and Cambridge University, studied music with Leonard Bernstein, has had six productions on Broadway and six in London’s West End, has won two Laurence Olivier Awards and two Helen Hayes Awards, holds the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and has had his plays commissioned by both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Bristol Old Vic. He is also, by the consistent assessment of critics and audiences across the more than 30 countries in over 20 languages where his work has been produced, genuinely funny — a combination of credentials and craft that is rarer than it sounds, since serious dramatic accolades and the specific ability to make an audience laugh reliably and consistently are not always found together in the same playwright. Baskerville is the play where those qualities converge most visibly.

The source material Ludwig is adapting is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, the most atmospheric and most gothic of the Sherlock Holmes novels — the one in which the detective and his companion Watson travel to the desolate moors of Devonshire to investigate the supposed curse haunting the Baskerville family, a supernatural hound said to prey on the male heirs of the estate, whose most recent victim has been found dead on the grounds under circumstances that suggest either a very large animal or a very clever murderer. Doyle’s novel works because its combination of locked-room mystery logic and Gothic horror atmosphere produces a specific kind of dread that his other Holmes stories, set primarily in London drawing rooms and railway carriages, do not reach. Ludwig’s adaptation is a deliberate and affectionate assault on every element of that atmosphere: the Gothic dread becomes material for physical comedy, the disguises that Holmes employs throughout the novel become increasingly elaborate theatrical setpieces, and the narrative’s genuine mystery — who killed Sir Charles Baskerville, and is the hound real? — is preserved as the engine that drives the plot even as everything surrounding it is played for maximum comic effect.

The theatrical mechanics that Ludwig employs to stage the forty-character constraint are what critics and audiences who have seen other productions of the play most consistently describe as its most delightful feature. Three of the five actors cycle through the large supporting cast while Holmes and Watson remain consistent, which means that individual performers are executing character transformations in full view of the audience — changing costumes, adjusting physicality, adopting accents, becoming entirely different people between one scene and the next, sometimes between one sentence and the next — with the audience’s awareness of the mechanics being not something to be hidden but something to be celebrated. The visible machinery of the theatrical transformation is the joke. When an actor who was just playing a suspicious Devonshire farmer reappears forty-five seconds later as a London society matron with a different wig and a different accent, the comedy depends on the audience seeing the change happen rather than being fooled by it. It is, in the most direct sense, a show about acting — about the physical and technical craft that allows trained performers to embody completely different people in rapid succession — and the audience’s enjoyment of it is the enjoyment of watching something technically demanding executed with apparent ease.

Critical response to productions of Baskerville across the country has converged on a specific set of descriptions: Theatermania called it a perfect mix of slapstick and thrills. Multiple reviewers have specifically cited the combination of genuine mystery — the plot does sustain real suspense about who killed Sir Charles and whether the hound is supernatural — with the comedy, noting that Ludwig manages to honor the spirit of Doyle’s original without sacrificing the farcical energy that the theatrical setup demands. The play runs approximately two hours including an intermission, is recommended for audiences aged 10 and up, and carries the specific family-event character that a summer comedic mystery at a professional classical theater produces: something that rewards adult theatergoers who know the Conan Doyle source material and entertains younger audience members for whom the physical comedy and rapid character transformations are the primary attraction.

The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey is also making a specific and meaningful effort to ensure that the production is accessible to family audiences through its Free Tix for Kids program, generously sponsored by the Merrill G. and Emita E. Hastings Foundation and the Madison Rotary Club. With the purchase of any eligible adult ticket — regular, senior, the under-35 priced ticket, or member — patrons can receive up to four free children’s tickets, eliminating the economic barrier that can make a professional theater outing with a family group financially prohibitive. The program makes Baskerville one of the more accessible professional summer productions in New Jersey for families whose children might be encountering live professional theater for the first time, and the play’s specific qualities — the physical comedy, the evident craft of the quick changes, the sustained mystery plot — make it an exceptionally well-suited first professional theater experience for young audiences.

The F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre on the Drew University campus in Madison, where the production runs July 11 through August 2, is the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey’s primary performance venue — the space where the organization that serves approximately 75,000 patrons annually stages its main-season productions, and where the summer of 2026 is also hosting the outdoor Rogue Shakespeare production of The Merry Wives of Windsor running August 14 through 23. Baskerville tickets are on sale now through the Shakespeare Theatre’s ticketing website, with regular performances on Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m., with additional midweek performances on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Doors open thirty minutes prior to each performance.