The next production of You’ve Ruined a Perfectly Good Mystery! will be by the Sahuaro High School Theatre Department in Tucson, Arizona. The director of the play is theatre teacher Christopher Younggren, who originated the role of The Detective. Performances are December 4 – 6 at Sahuaro High School Little Theater. Read more about the production in this article in the school’s online newspaper and purchase tickets for the evening performances here.
Author Archives: Christian Neuhaus
FURIOUSLY DOWNLOAD and CAREFULLY LISTEN
“Ruined” co-creator Christian Neuhaus recently joined a podcast to talk about a different type of interactive fiction: text adventure games from the 1980s. Episode 23 of The Retro Adventurers looks at three Sherlock Holmes games: Sherlock (Melbourne House), Sherlock Holmes: Another Bow (Bantam Software), and Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels (Infocom). https://retroadventurers.podbean.com/e/23
In Sherlock, you take a train to Leatherhead and investigate a double murder that resembles two cases from the canon. In Another Bow, you’re on an ocean voyage with an abundance of noteworthy people from 1919 and in The Riddle of the Crown Jewels, you play as Watson and traverse London in a quest to recover the stolen jewels.
The show notes include links for playing the games in a browser and links to the games’ Interactive Fiction Database pages, where user’s manuals for two of the games are available. All three IFDB pages have download links, if you have software for playing ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Infocom games. The user’s manual and the “lost manuscript” that accompanied Another Bow are available here: https://www.mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getgame=anotherbow
“Ruined” in New Zealand’s Hutt Valley, April 2025
The next production of You’ve Ruined a Perfectly Good Mystery, and its first outside the United States, will be at Hutt Repertory Theatre in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. Go to https://www.huttrep.co.nz/ to see the show’s CYOA-inspired poster and purchase tickets. Performances are April 2 – 12.
Art in the machine is liable to take the strangest forms
I tried some prompts with OpenAI’s DALL-E image generator around fall 2023. Holmes’s criticism in “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” that Watson “degraded what should have been a course of lectures” got me thinking of a contemporary course of lectures: TED Talks. I decided to see how DALL-E would represent a Sherlock Holmes TED Talk of a well-known story. The text in bold is the prompt I gave to DALL-E and the following images are the results.
sherlock holmes presenting “the adventure of the speckled band” as a TED talk
I then decided to describe the type of scene I wanted, and exclude the subject of the talk, as DALL-E appeared to be interpreting it as instruction to put a band around Sherlock Holmes.
sherlock holmes in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
sherlock holmes TED talk in a dark auditorium
To make Sherlock Holmes more recognizable, I gave DALL-E some iconography to incorporate.
sherlock holmes wearing a deerstalker hat and inverness cape in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
Maybe I was overloading DALL-E with imagery. I removed ‘inverness cape’ from the prompt.
sherlock holmes wearing a deerstalker hat in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
Would calling it a ‘cap’ instead of a ‘hat’ make a difference? No.
sherlock holmes wearing a deerstalker cap in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
Returning to the first prompt, I decided that DALL-E didn’t recognize “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” as “the one with the snake” and gave it an image to show in the presentation.
TED Talk about snakes, presented by sherlock holmes
Because the “speckled band” prompts were yielding illustrations, I tried specifying that I wanted a more realistic image.
photograph of sherlock holmes presenting “the adventure of the speckled band” as a TED talk
Finally, I tried a series of prompts where I directed DALL-E to imitate the style of Sherlock Holmes illustrator Sidney Paget.
a sidney paget illustration of sherlock holmes giving a TED Talk
a sidney paget illustration of sherlock holmes in a dark auditorium
(Interesting in this and the following that DALL-E included a light source without prompting.)
a sidney paget illustration of sherlock holmes speaking in a dark auditorium
a sidney paget illustration of sherlock holmes in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
In conclusion, my thoughts about these images align with a statement from the story I used in the first prompt: “some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace.”
BONUS IMAGES
At first, I mistakenly used the wrong spelling of “deerstalker.” I don’t have a problem admitting to that, since the results were pretty funny.
sherlock holmes wearing a dearstalker hat and inverness cape in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
sherlock holmes wearing a dearstalker hat in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
The scion where I live is The Notorious Canary-Trainers, and I tried some related images.
a sidney paget illustration of a man training canaries to pick pockets
a movie scene of canaries training with machine guns and flamethrowers, seen through a doorway
(Wayne’s World fans will understand.)
“I’ve never seen a group of actors get so into something, or be so unified.”
Sam White, director of the world premiere of You’ve Ruined a Perfectly Good Mystery! and the subsequent run at the New York International Fringe Festival, identifies “Ruined” as a career highlight in this recent interview: https://www.channel3000.com/madison-magazine/arts-and-culture/actor-sam-white-conquers-new-york-loses-battle-with-a-fireplace/1005306158
“Ruined” in Tucson: Aug 25 – Sept 17
The Comedy Playhouse and School (website, Facebook) in Tucson, Arizona is the latest company to produce You’ve Ruined a Perfectly Good Mystery! Performance times and ticket information are at https://www.thecomedyplayhouse.com/current-production.
The next “Ruined” – April 2015, San Antonio
San Antonio’s Rose Theatre Company (website, Facebook) is the next company to produce You’ve Ruined a Perfectly Good Mystery! In a story in the San Antonio Express-News (‘You’ve Ruined a Perfectly Good Mystery’ gets SA debut), Rose co-owner Chris Manley, who is also in the cast, said “Whenever I produce a show, I’m in the mindset of, ‘I want to do a show I want to see.’ This is something I want to see.” The production is directed by Matthew Byron Cassi and will apply the fight choreography experience of cast members Joseph Travis Urick (The Detective) and Morgan Clyde (The Narrator) to showcase more combat than the previous productions.
Below is the poster for the Rose production and a photo taken by Erin Polewski that accompanies the Express-News story. The Facebook event is here.
This is the first production of Ruined to take place after the “Free Sherlock” legal decision that ruled Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are characters in the public domain. That decision means we don’t have to be concerned about referring to Sherlock Holmes in descriptions of the play. It also means that there is a diminished imperative for referring to the investigators as only The Detective and The Doctor. Nonetheless we won’t be rewriting the play to give the characters their “true” names, as that would be, well, less funny.
#ExplodeHamlet – Shakespeare in Busan’s “To Be or Not to Be”
On March 25th Shakespeare in Busan performed a theatrical adaptation of Ryan North’s To Be Or Not to Be: That is the Adventure, a “chooseable-path” retelling of Hamlet. Like You’ve Ruined a Perfectly Good Mystery, the play featured a narrator soliciting choices from the audience. But in this case the audience was (potentially) global: the performance was livestreamed on YouTube, and viewers could vote by commenting on the YouTube video or by adding #tobeornottobe to a tweet. I enjoyed observing through @ruinednarrator the audience engagement on Twitter and the enthusiasm for this form of theater.
Below is a recording of the performance, which features multiple passes through the book. In addition to choosing different directions for the plot, To Be Or Not To Be gives you the option at the beginning of following one of thee characters: Ophelia, King Hamlet (deceased), or Prince Hamlet.
“Ruined” in 15
In December 2005 the film The Producers opened: a movie based on a stage musical that was based on a movie. In December 2012, Rick Stemm and I created a short version of You’ve Ruined a Perfectly Good Mystery: a 15-minute (or thereabouts) play based on a full-length play that was based on a 15-minute play. The motivator was the opportunity to submit a script to the Simian Showcase produced by Monkeyman Productions, which calls itself “Toronto’s Geekiest Theatre Company.”
There are elements of the original short script from 2009 that we used in the 2010 full-length: similar opening scene, audience interaction, Narrative-Detective tension, and an investigation at Heaving Hall. But the plots are different. We nevertheless used the 2009 script as a starting point, keeping its basic structure and rewriting to incorporate concepts and dialogue from the full-length version. We replaced the single ending of the 2009 play with abridged versions of two of the three endings from the full-length. This meant we had to rewrite the original so that instead of investigating a surreptitiously drugged noblemen, the Detective and Doctor were collecting information that led to a confrontation with either clockwork men or a mind control device.
The scenes of the two scripts mapped pretty well to each other, so one of the biggest challenges for me was figuring out what to cut, to keep the script around 15 pages. I worked on a draft and sent it to Rick, who would respond with his suggestions, and after an exchange of six drafts we had a script ready to submit. It was an interesting project to work on, and I’m glad that we can now include calls for short plays in the submission opportunities we look at for Ruined.
“Ruined” – the next generation
The first organization to produce You’ve Ruined a Perfectly Good Mystery! after Mercury Players Theatre was the East Side Players of Madison East High School. Drama Director and Ruined cast member Paul Milisch directed a one-act version of the play for East’s entry in the Wisconsin High School Forensics Association’s State Theatre Festival. The production’s public debut was Dec 8 – 10 as part of “An Eastside Night of Mystery.”
I attended a Saturday afternoon performance and took the following photos. Some familiar props, including the giant magnifying glass and Von Evilton’s device, were part of the production. Alterations from the previous production included dual narrators, an astounding red wig for Von Evilton, and a prodigious bustle for Katherine, who was renamed Katherine Booty-Heaving. And there were T-shirts for sale!
You've Ruined a Perfectly Good Mystery! 
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