THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD
There’s a mystery to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, all right. The mystery is how this musical-comedy mediocrity ever got onto a professional stage in the first place. It must have been an awfully lean season in New York when this turkey won five Tony Awards, including three for Rupert Holmes, author of the script, music, and lyrics.
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But what they’re working on is utter rot. The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a “high concept” musical whose concept is at once trivial and overdone; a “music hall” show that has about as much to do with traditional music-hall as an airport lounge band has to do with jazz; an “audience participation” piece in which the audience is required not so much to participate in the entertainment as to provide it. Drood is like a picnic: if the family’s all together and determined to have fun, they’ll have fun even if it rains.
Based on Charles Dickens’s last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a show within a show. A tatty music-hall troupe in late-nineteenth-century London is presenting its version of Dickens’s story. (The programs advise us that it’s 1892 at Candlelight but only 1873 at Apple Tree, for whatever that’s worth.) This being Victorian melodrama, the action is campily overplayed, the audience is encouraged to boo and hiss the villain, and the actors are as likely as not to break character to take a bow, repeat a particularly juicy line, engage in lewd banter with the audience, or throw the story away altogether for a sudden, rousingly irrelevant rendition of the company’s trademark tune, “Off to the Races.” Also in the style of some British entertainment of the period, the hero is played by a woman; thus “the Music Hall Royale” presents London’s “leading male impersonator,” Miss Alice Nutting, in the lead role of Mr. Edwin Drood.
As Drood, Candlelight’s Kathy Santen has a boyish physical presence but a too-girlish singing voice; Apple Tree’s Monica Mary McCarthy is more believable in the role, and McCarthy’s climactic temper tantrum as the actress Miss Nutting provides one of the few moments of real comedy in either production.
