The Drawer Boy The three-person cast of this Redtwist production spend two hours swimming upstream. They’ve all delivered convincing performances with the company before, so the problem likely lies in Michael Healey’s belabored script. It starts implausibly: a young actor wandering the Canadian countryside asks a pair of random, reclusive fiftysomething farmers if he can live with them for a while because he’s, um, writing a play about farmers, and they let him right in. Then it grows increasingly contrived. Healey takes too long to invent something that matters (the kid’s inability to write anything good doesn’t, although it eats up lots of stage time), then overreaches with an overcooked dark-secret twist. Director Scott Weinstein’s overly emphatic production often plays to the script’s weaknesses. —Justin Hayford
The Man Who Murdered Sherlock Holmes More than a century before Making a Murderer, Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle undertook his own criminal-justice crusade on behalf of George Edalji, a half-Indian solicitor convicted on weak evidence of mutilating livestock in his Staffordshire village. In this new musical by John Reeger, Julie Shannon, and Michael Mahler, Doyle investigates the case with the assistance of Holmes, who has managed to escape the bounds of fiction and is pissed off about Doyle’s recent effort to kill him off. The show entertains as a buddy comedy and a whodunnit, thanks largely to the top-flight cast assembled by director Warner Crocker. But since Edalji remains a cipher in Reeger’s book, the important and still resonant issue of racial prejudice is merely glanced at. —Zac Thompson
Yasmina’s Necklace Director Ann Filmer does everything right in his world premiere production of Rohina Malik’s gracefully written romantic comedy, about two Muslim families and their awkward attempts to bring together their two misfit adult children. The casting is perfect: Susaan Jamshidi just shines as Yasmina, a troubled, talented artist haunted by her past life in Iraq and Syria. She is well matched well with Michael Perez, her reluctant suitor, a man still recovering from a bad divorce. One minute Malik invites us to laugh at her character’s foibles, the next she wants us to be moved by their personal tragedies; Filmer deftly balances the light and the dark. The result is a thoroughly satisfying family drama. —Jack Helbig
