Welcome to Page to the Stage’25-’26!

Hello!

Welcome to Page to the Stage. We are excited to have you all for Miss Holmes Returns. (I was gonna find a currently-used term for “excited,” so you would all think I’m cool, but every word I suggested to my 13-year-old was met with a stare of pity and/or a slow shake of the head. So I won’t even try.)

In just a few weeks, we will be able to see you all, and you will be able to see Miss Holmes Returns, our fun, roller-coaster murder mystery (for those of you who came to Page to the Stage last year, this is a standalone sequel to Miss Holmes). I think this show is funnier than the first one, but when it gets dark, it’s also much darker. So be ready for anything!

First a bit on Sherlock Holmes, especially the one you will be seeing: Created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887, Holmes quickly became one of the most iconic figures in detective fiction. In fact, the genre itself was rather small before Holmes and Watson appeared on the literary scene. Sherlock and Watson have been portrayed by thousands of actors across theatre, film, television, and radio. In our show, they are both women. Everything else in the play is as it would be circa 1885, and the performances, sets, costumes, and props draw inspiration, both directly and indirectly, from the original stories written by Sir Conan Doyle. Holmes is a brilliant, eccentric detective known for razor-sharp logic and powers of observation. If the original Sherlock, as a man, was considered “eccentric,” then imagine how much more so a woman in Victorian England might be side-eyed for her entire vibe. In the previous play, Sherlock was, multiple times, forcibly placed in a mental hospital (asylum) in order to try to crush her intelligence, spirit, and ambition. The entire reasoning for this was that she is a woman. The entire equation shifts with her gender.

Sherlock’s detection methods included deduction based on lightning-fast observations, as well as forensic science, which was very undeveloped at the time. (Fingerprinting and “dusting for prints” weren’t even a thing yet in the late 1800s.) Sherlock uses things like footprints, dirt types, botany (the study of plants), and chemistry to solve cases that Scotland Yard cannot crack. All of these were groundbreaking at the time, and the popularity of the Holmes stories actually influenced the development of real-life forensic science. After all, it worked for Sherlock…perhaps it could work in real life?

OK, that’s it for today! There will be lots of videos and things a bit less dry than multiple paragraphs, I promise! Teachers, we will create a post that lays out what to expect between now and the show on 10/15, and pin it to the top of the blog so you always have quick access.

~ Trista (Sherlock)