Kellams: This is Ozarks at Large. We're going to go The Other Way with Becca Martin Brown, and Becca is with me on the phone from her office in Bella Vista. Welcome back to the show.
Brown: Thank you for finding me. I seem to have been lost for a while today. Maybe we need to find Sherlock Holmes to find me.
Kellams: Well, there is a nice segue, because we're going to be talking about a Sherlock Holmes production.
Brown: An Evening with Sherlock Holmes, presented by Northwest Arkansas Audio Theater, opens this Saturday at a church in Bella Vista and continues through Oct. 18 at various places. And we're going to talk to Scott Anderson, the writer and director, and Jonathan Woodliff, who is playing Sherlock Holmes.
Kellams: Okay, so you want me to call two people and get them in the conversation?
Brown: I've already made this morning complicated. So yeah.
Kellams: It's anything but elementary, my dear. Let's see if I can do this. If I've done this correctly, we have Jonathan and Scott on the phone. Gentlemen, are you there?
Anderson: Yes.
Woodliff: Yes.
Brown: So, Scott, I want to know about how the ideas for these two segments of Sherlock Holmes' world came about for you, because they're both original scripts.
Anderson: Yes, yes, although the first script is A Scandal in Bohemia, so I'm following the canon, the story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, pretty straight up. The second one was kind of I, and some. My wife and a friend were having dinner, and we were discussing what to pair that show with, and the idea of Our Villainous Serenity came to be. And then we spent several months actually working up the story. I really wanted to give our female actresses a chance to shine. So it wasn't just an all-male ensemble production.
Brown: Are you a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes? Along with being a huge fan of audio theatre, talk about how those things came together for you.
Anderson: A huge fan of both. Growing up I watched the black-and-white Sherlock Holmes with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce with my dad. And as far as Sherlock Holmes. I really, even when I was a young lad, I really found the stories interesting. I got into him because of the Sherlock Holmes movies, got into these stories. It's just all wonderful memories and longtime fans, and I've been a fan of old-time radio for just as long. My father and I would occasionally listen to them on a Saturday afternoon local radio station, which would broadcast some classic radio, and I fell in love with the medium.
Kellams: Jonathan Woodliff, let me ask you about being Sherlock Holmes. He's a character who's been portrayed by everyone from Basil Rathbone to George C. Scott to Robert Downey Jr. What do you do to make your Sherlock you?
Woodliff: I certainly hope I'm not as maybe not as arrogant as he is, but I try to follow a canon. I try to follow Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's version and description of the character, and he's a self-described high-functioning psychopath. Which in this particular story is not going to come into play as much. He's kind of a shady character. He's basically more or less.
A lot of people may find that surprising that the hero's a shady character. And actually, if nobody's read Scandal in Bohemia or seen an adaptation of it, I don't want to spoil it. But he does kind of play a dirty trick in A Scandal in Bohemia. So which this, our version, is called A Royal Suitor. He's fun to play because he's that kind of character.
Kellams: There is also a Dr. John Watson in this production. Yes?
Woodliff: Absolutely. Oh, yes.
Kellams: Okay, so, Scott, I mean, that's one of the most famous teams in literary history. What do you do to make that team vibrant?
Anderson: Well, I'm hoping that the dialogue qualifies as vibrant, although in while Holmes and Watson have much greater interaction in the first story than they do in the second. They are not together in the second story but for a few moments. The tale is the second story is told more from the perspective of Watson. Sherlock Holmes shows up and has a key role, but it's kind of Watson focus, to be honest.
Brown: So what should audiences expect? We're talking about audio theatre, like they know what we're talking about.
Anderson: The show is set up like a 1950s or 1940s radio show with a live studio audience. So we have our actors coming up, the microphones with scripts, doing different voices. Jonathan has, what, four different voices or five?
Woodliff: Probably. Let's see, there's Holmes playing to at least three different characters. And so that's four voices right there. And then there are two in the second show that would make about six.
Anderson: We have a sound effects team that make physical sound effects to replicate the sound that we desire. So for example, for our horses, horse-drawn carriages, we have a pair of coconut shells which are banged on a block of wood or a tile to replicate horse hooves.
Kellams: Monty Python salutes you.
Anderson: Yes, we have, just as an example, if you were to take a cellophane chip bag and crinkle it up and mess with it in front of a microphone, it sounds like a fire. So we have that. We have a telephone that we use. We have a small mini door that we open, we close, we bang on.
Sometimes we have recorded sound effects because you just can't replicate that. For example, a car engine. It's very difficult to replicate with mechanical means. You really need something that sounds like a car engine.
Our final component is music. So we have my wife playing piano, although sometimes it's an electronic keyboard. But in this case we can get all the music we wanted through a piano. So that's what we're using. And she provides transitional music. She helps set the scene audio-wise for what's going on.
Kellams: Jonathan, this is such an interesting, multi-layered job for an actor because you're acting. And in the golden days of radio, you were acting and not seen. There might be a live audience, but the majority of people weren't seeing you. Here you are. You're acting, but you're also seen. So what's that like for you on stage?
Woodliff: Well, until I joined the audio theatre, I had never acted in that way before. And I basically take whatever you would use in voiceover. If you watch voiceovers doing cartoons, they're making fools out of themselves in the booth. So I basically physically act in front of everyone. And plus that basically puts the character across.
The more energy you put into it, the more energy comes across, even when people aren't looking at you. So I try to make sure that I'm acting in a way that if people have their eyes closed or if they were listening at home, they would still pick up on the energy.
I find sometimes that can be a little tiring, but I try to bring as much energy as I would to a stage production to that. And also I had to learn to stay aimed in the microphone, which took me about maybe a couple of shows a few years ago to get the hang of. I don't have that problem anymore.
It took me a little while. It's really fun and I do use a few props, so I'm putting hats on and things like that. So the audience does have something to see, but we don't really do full costumes and changes and things like that.
Brown: Kyle's going to tell you the dates because he wrote them down.
Kellams: That's right. I'll first tell you that Jonathan Woodliff is Sherlock Holmes in An Evening with Sherlock Holmes from Northwest Arkansas Audio Theater. Scott Anderson, writer and director.
The dates: Oct. 4 United Lutheran Church in Bella Vista at 2 p.m.; Oct. 9 at First Presbyterian Church in Rogers at 7 p.m.; Oct. 10 First Presbyterian Church, Springdale, at 7 p.m.; Oct. 12 The Medium in downtown Springdale at 2 p.m. ; Oct. 18 Fayetteville Public Library at 2 p.m.
Scott, Jonathan, Becca, thank you so much.
All: Thank you. You're welcome.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
