I’ve seen the musical adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood twice now—first, in the 1990s, at a New Jersey
community theater, then at the Roundabout Theatre Co. production at Studio 54, which closed this past weekend. In
each case, five minutes after leaving the theater, I couldn’t hum any melodies
or recall any lyrics from the show. That does, I think, point to a potentially
game-ending aspect of this property, first created in 1985 by Rupert Holmes.
Nevertheless, especially in the case of the
Roundabout exercise in theatrical joie de vivre, I thought I’d never seen a
musical staged with such good humor, zest and affection. Maybe the backstage
proceedings were as dark and violent as in this last, unfinished novel by
Charles Dickens, but I’d never know it by what I had just witnessed.
True, Drood’s
popularity, both in its most recent incarnation and in the smaller regional
productions mounted since its original premiere, owes more than a little bit to
its much-discussed marketing ploy: i.e., at each performance, the audience
votes on the ending that Dickens
hadn’t provided before his death in 1870. (Actually, two endings: they not only identify the murderer, but a couple to be married.)
But I don’t think that was the only factor underlying
its success. The fun started with its
“envelope,” or play-within-a-play, setting:
an 1890s British theatrical troupe, the Music Hall Royale, is staging
the mystery, thus allowing the Roundabout’s cast to double up on roles and satirize the conventions of music halls and Victorian melodramas (to which
Dickens was addicted).
One of the most effective scenes was the Christmas
Eve dinner. Amazingly, Dickens, that most theatrically minded of novelists, did
not dramatize the events of that night in his unfinished work. As creator of
the musical’s “book,” Holmes took up the challenge and handled it masterfully.
I still have my reservations about the show’s lyrics and music (I can only
account for the Best Musical Tony it won in its original production because of
weak competition from Big Deal, Goblin Market and Personals), but not with the cleverness of Holmes’ plotting.
The “Chairman” introducing that melodrama—really,
more like an emcee (or, given how wild the proceedings can be at times, the
ringmaster)—was played by Jim Norton,
in marvelously droll style as he delivered one straight-faced one-liner after
another. The headliner was legendary Broadway musical-comedy star Chita Rivera (West Side Story, Chicago,
Kiss of the Spider Woman), still fascinating this time as the Princess Puffer, the mysterious proprietor of an opium
den.
Stephanie J. Block, who replaced Sutton Foster as the redoubtable Reno
Sweeney in the Roundabout’s Anything Goes,
here had the opportunity to put her stamp on a different revival, and she made
the most of both her cross-dressing role as the title character, as well as the
diva of the theatrical troupe, Miss Alice Nutting. Playing Drood’s uncle John
Jasper was Will Chase, who
magnificently brought to the surface the secret torment of his character, who, as
an opium-den visitor and worshipper of a much younger woman, resembled Dickens.
(In the post-show discussion, Roundabout education dramaturg Ted Sod revealed
Holmes’ feeling that, had Dickens managed to complete his novel, Robert Louis
Stevenson would not have written Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, since the prototype of the evil, schizophrenic “double” would
already have been created.)
Director Scott Ellis, who has helmed several other
vibrant Roundabout shows (e.g., Harvey,
Twelve Angry Men, Picnic), displayed a similar
surehanded grasp of stagecraft here. The
Mystery of Edwin Drood could, by now, have acquired as much dust as the
home of Dickens’ unhappy Great Expectations spinster, Miss Havisham. This might not have been the
most innovative musical comedy, but it was surely among the most crowd-pleasing
that I’ve ever witnessed.
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