It’s a work in progress indeed, and we get to see it, enjoy it, give Clear Space written feedback, and thus partner in the progress of what is surely a terrific idea for a show that may some day enjoy a full-fledged New York run.

Clear Space at its innovative best? Elementary, my dear Watson!

“Sherlock Holmes: The Early Years” begins when Holmes and Watson first meet and decide to share an apartment in turn-of-the-century London. Holmes has already dipped into crime solving, and the arch-fiend of note is The Spider who stencils a spider on the Queen’s panties, steals the crown jewels – that sort of thing. We soon learn that The Spider is, in fact, a trio of whacked out nurses in a London Hospital who manage to keep us amused, to greater and lesser extents, throughout the course of what turns out to be a fairly long evening.

It all comes to a head in Blunt Manor, a decaying English Manor House with only part of a roof over the west wing, that will soon come crashing down on the Dowager Countess Blunt herself (splendidly performed by local favorite Esther Friend), just before young Holmes solves a multiplex of crimes and mistaken identities.

It’s great fun, sort of like an English trifle at Christmastime – but it hasn’t the faintest idea what it means to be, or perhaps more precisely, what style it means to be it in. The show acknowledges its debt to English Music Hall, and director Doug Yetter acknowledges his debt to what he calls melodrama and vaudeville. I found it to be a sort of American musical review, laced with semi-operatic camp.

Perhaps not as elementary as we first thought.

This work in progress clearly needs serious work back at the drawing board, but not from the gang who performed it at Clear Space. They’re great.

Ken Skrzesz is perfectly adequate as Holmes, ably abetted by John Hulse as Dr. Watson who looks for all the world like a cross between Clement Atlee and Oliver Hardy. It’s a uniformly strong cast, as we’ve grown to expect at Clear Space, and I particularly enjoyed Valorie Jarrell as Holmes’s landlady and Jeff Haslow as Constable Lewis.

Yetter and Skrzesz have directed and choreographed the show with precision and zest, and Melanie Bradley and her follow-musicians do a splendid job in the pit.

When I saw the show, there wasn’t an empty seat. The audience loved it, and the final (and best) production number, “When Can We Do It Again?” put a wide grin on everyone’s face. As far as they were concerned, the Clear Space crew could have done it again right away.

Hey Watson – it’s elementary, right?

Now let’s get back to the drawing board.