WITNESSES FOR ‘SHERLOCK’S LAST CASE’

Charles Marowitz’s “Sherlock’s Last Case,” first seen at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre, has opened at the Kennedy Center to encouraging, if somewhat patronizing, notices.

Producer-star Frank Langella plans to take it to Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre on Aug. 13. “I suspect that the play would be better off going directly into the summer-stock repertory,” wrote David Richards of the Washington Post. “It is probably better suited as a road show,” wrote Variety.

But they couldn’t deny that they’d had a good time. Variety found Langella ideal for the role of Sherlock Holmes, and said that Marowitz’s script supplied just about everything you could ask for in a Sherlock Holmes play: “clever repartee, a diabolical scheme, a miraculous escape. Elementary.”

Richards gave playwright Marowitz credit for providing the Holmes legend with a new twist, and one with “psychological justifications. . . . Holmes, he understands, is not the easiest person in the world to live with. The world’s greatest detective is a Mr. Know It All.”

Richards found Langella somewhat less stylish than he was in “Dracula,” but still pretty slick. “The script gives him the opportunity to comment on his own performance, and he does so with wonderful goggle-eyed mischief. This isn’t a work for all seasons, but rather an antidote for July and August.”

July in Washington always has been a killer.

O’Neill’s “The Hairy Ape”--the show that started off the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre in 1975--showed up at the National Theatre of Great Britain last month, in a guest production by Peter Stein’s Schaubuhne Company.

The language was German, of course, and some of the critics suggested that O’Neill’s dialogue was easier to take that way. (“A powerful but hopelessly crude play,” wrote Jim Hiley in the Listener.)

As so often in German theater, it was the stage pictures that took everyone’s breath away. Much of the play is set on an ocean liner, and designer Lucio Fanti practically constructed one for the show, with a working furnace room, promenade deck and stokers’ cabin.

But it wasn’t just the visuals that impressed Michael Coveney of the Financial Times. “This is a great resume of a certain kind of European theater that went out years ago, but is simultaneously endemic of a serious intention to reanimate Western political drama and relate it to a German tradition.”

Kenneth Hurren put it more simply in the Mail on Sunday: “Stein’s monkey-business is impressive.”

Speaking of stage design, the United States took the gold medal at the Prague Quadrennial of scenic and costume design in June. Its entry, designed by John Conklin, was a one-story “building” with four rooms: a Los Angeles art director’s studio, a New York set designer’s studio, a costume design shop and a light designer’s studio. There are plans to put it on tour in the States.

IN QUOTES. C. J. Mellor in Back Stage weekly: “What America needs right now is a good ad campaign to get it back on its feet.”