How To Critique A Christmas Carol

I actually quite enjoyed watching this episode of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It was actually more entertaining than I had originally expected. It was a thankful reprieve from the last theatrical work I had to review. The cast and crew made good use of music and set design. The casting was appropriate as well, as in the characters were believable.

In the scene after John Horner is arrested, you can hear Christmas carols playing in the street. It perturbed me a bit that they played the same Christmas carol throughout the show. They never played any different ones. I looked up the carol they had chosen, which happened to be God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. That particular carol is a traditional English Christmas carol. I believe it is supposed

Dickens mentioned the carol in his story, which takes place about forty years earlier, at the latest. The sounds of the horse drawn-carriages were also very loud. Carriages were a very common thing in London during that time period. There were bells on the carriages as well, which also communicated it being Christmastime. The market scene was also very loud and chaotic. You could hear people hawking their wares to passersby. In the scene as the Countess comes back, you can hear the music change to something sort of suspenseful, almost foreshadowing. The music shows up again when Commissionaire Peterson reports that his wife found the blue carbuncle in the goose’s crop, and again when Holmes and Watson are discussing the blue carbuncle just before Henry Baker shows up. The music turns into something more purposeful in the scene after Holmes & Watson leave the Inn. You can still tell that it is the same Christmas carol, though.

Sherlock Holmes. He was actually my personal favorite. For most of the show he dressed in a nice black suit and tie, with his hair slicked back very neatly. He also wore a black bowler cap and grey coat for a good portion of the show. I do remember in one scene he wore a long nightshirt and robe and his hair was tousled. He had just woken up in this scene, so it was very appropriate on the part of the costumers. His accent was believable, but then I believe all the actors actually are British, so it probably wasn’t very hard for them to do the accents. It probably just came naturally. His posture was excellent, as were his movements and mannerisms. They made it very believable to think of him as an upper middle class man in London. I actually would say that he is the most believable Sherlock I have ever seen. Frank Middlemass as Henry Baker was also quite charming. We didn’t see much of him, but he was a charismatic gentleman for what we did see. He was dressed in a long black coat and grey scarf with fingerless gloves. The costumers did a satisfying job of making it look like he had seen better days. His posture and mannerisms also made it believable that he was raised in a respectable household. I especially enjoyed his voice and use of vocabulary. The use of vocabulary on his part was what made it most believable for me to believe he was a man who was formerly upper middle class and had fallen on hard