A Sherlock Carol Tickets

Deck the halls with Doyle and Dickens! A Sherlock Carol brings together two classic literary characters for a holiday show filled with Christmas cheer — and mystery. Get A Sherlock Carol tickets on TodayTix now.

You might guess from the title which two fictional worlds are mashed up in the A Sherlock Carol play. Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic detective, Sherlock Holmes, is dropped into the world of A Christmas Carol, where Tiny Tim is now grown and Ebenezer Scrooge is dead. Tim enlists Holmes’s help to investigate Scrooge’s death, which happened under mysterious circumstances. Holmes agrees, as his longtime foe Moriarty has also died and he needs a new sense of purpose. But while investigating Scrooge, Holmes is visited by some familiar haunts of the old man: the ghosts of present, past, and future.

The A Sherlock Carol play, as described by playwright Mark Shanahan, invites audiences of all ages to see characters they think they know well in a whole new light and delight in the Christmas spirits that now haunt the characters. Shanahan also directs A Sherlock Carol Off-Broadway, and the production also features lighting design by Rui Rita, sound design by John Gromada, costumes by Linda Cho, and set design by Anna Louizos. Get tickets to A Sherlock Carol in New York on TodayTix.

What to Watch For

• Playwright Mark Shanahan and Drew McVety, who plays Sherlock Holmes, previously acted together in Conor McPherson’s play The Weir, which incorporates stories of the supernatural. After seeing his performance, Shanahan wanted to write a play to cast McVety in, and McVety encouraged him to write A Sherlock Carol while in their dressing room.
• Arthur Conan Doyle sets one of his Sherlock Holmes short stories at Christmastime: The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, in which Holmes investigates the theft of a valuable gemstone.
• Victorian buyers were really in the holiday spirit! Charles Dickens’ original A Christmas Carol novel was first published on Dec. 19, 1843, and by Christmas Eve five days later, all 6,000 copies were sold. The book has never been out of print since.
• In 2012, Sherlock Holmes received the Guinness World Record for the most-portrayed human literary character in film and TV, beating out Hamlet with 48 films, TV series, dramas, and documentaries featuring Holmes in existence as of then. Now “stage portrayals” can join the list!
• Sherlock Holmes has nothing on Ebenezer Scrooge, though. A Christmas Carol has received hundreds of adaptations between direct film, TV, and stage adaptations; films, shows, and plays based on Dickens’ premise and characters; adaptations for radio, video games, and graphic novels; and parodies.