The Play Starts Before You Find Your Seat

WEST HARWICH · ON STAGE

Kids in Holmes-era clothes work the aisles before curtain, a Chronicle critic writes. The theater is in season 75. Through Nov. 8.

5 min read · A Celebrate Lower Cape spotlight

On opening night in West Harwich, some of the children in the audience joined the cast before the play had properly begun. Other kids, dressed for Victorian London, were already working the house, and the visitors took the hint.

That account comes from Amy Tagliaferri, who wrote up the first night of The Baker Street Irregulars: A Scandal in Bohemia for the Cape Cod Chronicle on Oct. 20. CLC wasn't in the seats. Everything below about the evening is hers, taken in the order she describes it.

The show is the fall production at Cape Cod Theatre Company/Harwich Junior Theatre, on Division Street, which opened the run Oct. 16. Which leaves a fair question for anyone buying a ticket: at a show built like this, where does the audience stop and the cast begin?

"Be sure to arrive early"

That's the first line of her piece, and the reason comes right after it. The show begins as soon as you enter the theater, she writes. Children in clothing from the Sherlock Holmes era "skitter around you and yell frantically."

She calls the pre-show mingling the signature of Brian Lore Evans, who adapted the script and directs. She'd seen the same thing at his Dracula a few years ago. The theater's own ticket page sets up the premise in one sentence about the Irregulars: "They may only be children, but they know the art of deduction as well as any great detective."

A key hidden backstage in London

Then the actual play starts. In the critic's telling, a mysterious woman walks onto what looks like the backstage of a London theater, scared and guarded, as if she's being followed. She hides a key. The Irregulars turn up and work out most of her story fast: her name is Irene Adler, and the man following her is one Wilhelm Ornstein.

The core crew is Wiggins (Coco Kemp), Theo (Ollie Shaw), Suds (Ciara Cannon) and Cecil (Victoria Lebedynskyi). Tagliaferri found them fun and funny and their accents "spot-on." James Byrne's set is built as that London backstage, and she says he used every bit of the stage, "even the walls along the side."

Questions for a character, not an actor

Just before intermission, the Irregulars head to Irene Adler's apartment to look for more clues. Then the stage crew turns the set into that apartment, and the audience is encouraged to come up onto the stage, explore it, and question the actors, who stay in character.

That was the children from the audience realizing they were onstage and, in a sense, part of the show, by her account. Sam Sewell, a Cape theater artist and a former student and actor at the Harwich theater, is quoted comparing it to "a 'please touch' museum," only for theater.

So for one intermission, the answer to the question above is the lip of the stage. It's open.

A detective who shows up late

Sherlock Holmes doesn't arrive until act two. Jon Cornet plays him "with a playful yet respectful air," per the critic, and Nick Romano's Ornstein is "delightfully over-the-top." She doesn't give away the ending, and neither will we.

The evening runs more than two hours, interactive intermission included. Her verdict on that length: "the time flies by." The theater recommends the show for ages 7 and up.

Three shows on $100

The company behind all this is in its 75th season. According to the theater's history, Betty Bobp, a drama teacher at Wheelock College in Boston, founded Harwich Junior Theatre in 1951. She secured space in Harwich Center's four-story Exchange Hall, "at the time, the tallest building on the Cape."

In the summer of 1952, with a few volunteers, the new theater put on Cinderella, Tom Sawyer and The Ghost of Mr. Penny. Bobp made the costumes, taught the students, built the sets and directed all three, on a budget of $100. This summer's schedule, the 75th, had a Cinderella on it too, the Rodgers and Hammerstein one, per the season page.

That first building has its own CLC thread. The Exchange is the one Harwich got from a West Harwich coffee man for $1, and a Chronicle editorial once called it "the birthplace of the Harwich Junior Theatre." After the town let the Exchange go (it came down starting in November 1964), Bobp moved the company to the former Ocean Hall on Division Street, a move the theater dates to 1965. Ocean Hall had once held a public hall downstairs, a Masonic lodge on the second floor and a dining room on the third.

The 1960s also brought the Junior Players, a youth touring group the theater says still runs today. These days the company counts 10 full-scale productions a year for audiences of more than 20,000. Its 75th anniversary gala on Oct. 9 is listed on its own site as sold out.

The Irregulars keep working the house on Division Street through Nov. 8. As of Oct. 22, the theater's online box office showed every remaining performance on sale, the Halloween matinee included.

Sources: Cape Cod Chronicle, Amy Tagliaferri, Oct. 20, 2026; Cape Cod Theatre Company/Harwich Junior Theatre home page, history page, 2026 season page and online box office; Cape Cod Chronicle editorial, "Our View: A Fair Exchange"; Celebrate Lower Cape

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