By Ken Ludwig. Directed by John Murphy. An Arts Club production. At the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage on Wednesday, September 14. Continues until October 9

It’s easiest to talk about Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery in terms of what it’s not. For starters, it’s not very funny.

Playwright Ken Ludwig has taken the classic mystery by Arthur Conan Doyle and turned it into a quick-change farce: Holmes and his friend Dr. Watson are each played by one actor. Three other performers divvy up the remaining 36 roles.

But Baskerville is not The Mystery of Irma Vep, Charles Ludlam’s masterpiece of quick-change hilarity. Irma Vep is a showcase for virtuosity: individual actors play scenes with themselves, changing characters—and costumes—with superhuman speed. In Baskerville, there’s a lot of self-congratulatory huffing and puffing as the performers undertake less-than-dazzling transformations.

Baskerville is also not Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor, an uproarious farce that is the playwright’s biggest hit. Partly, that’s because the stakes are so low in Baskerville.

Holmes and Watson investigate the death of Sir Charles Baskerville, who died on the moors near his manor, apparently in terror. Sir Charles believed in a giant spectral hound that has presumably been pursuing his family since the English Civil War. Did the hound kill him or was he murdered, as his friend, Dr. James Mortimer, suspects? And if Sir Charles was murdered, will the same villain take the life of his heir, Sir Henry Baskerville—newly arrived from Canada in the original, but sporting a Texan twang in Ludwig’s retake.

You’d think that all of this might provide fodder for suspense, ratcheting up the drama underneath the comedy, but Ludwig’s script is so superficial that no tension accumulates. Instead, we get a lot of baseless humour. One of my few laughs came when Holmes described Dr. Mortimer’s spaniel, “who is scratching at my front door with the zeal of a Christian”.

Fortunately, the cast is strong in this Arts Club production. Lauren Bowler, the sole woman in the cast, is also the best thing in the show. In the liveliest scene, one of her characters, Miss Stapleton, meets Sir Henry and the two fall frantically in love. The passage works partly because Bowler has something to play: Miss Stapleton has a secret. But it also works because Bowler commits to the requisite combination of emotional reality and physical exaggeration. Kirk Smith, Bowler’s partner in that scene, brings a similar groundedness to his work throughout. And Mike Wasko, the third multiple cast actor, has an infectiously good time—especially as a Castilian hotelier.

Mark Weatherley (Watson) and Alex Zahara (Holmes) give performances that are solid, but they could both be more credibly emotionally invested.

The physical production is refreshingly original. Designer Ted Roberts offers set pieces, including a parlour for Holmes, but he also slides in a number of screens that provide projection surfaces for Candelario Andrade’s video design. So we see a still image of the manor’s grounds, for instance, then, in a superimposed video, we see Sir Charles fleeing across those grounds. It’s very cool. Mara Gottler’s costumes are witty and sumptuous.

There’s a lot of talent here, but it’s serving a mediocre script.