The likeliest choice for villain is Edwin’s uncle Mr. Drood, it seems, had his share of enemies. When Dickens’s Drood ends, young Edwin Drood has apparently (but not certifiably) been slain, and a mysterious fellow named Dick Datchery is roaming the streets of the cathedral city of Cloisterham, trying to sift among the numerous clues and motives that surround the case. Edwin Drood.įurther, since Dickens died before completing his story, the Music Hall Royale actors invite the audience to choose not only who done it but who deduced it.
(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. A tatty music-hall troupe in late-nineteenth-century London is presenting its version of Dickens’s story. Drood is like a picnic: if the family’s all together and determined to have fun, they’ll have fun even if it rains.īased on Charles Dickens’s last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a show within a show. 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. The Candlelight and Apple Tree productions combined are providing paychecks (I hope) to more than 35 actor-singer-dancers most are familiar faces in off-Loop and suburban theater, and it’s good to see them (and the designers and technicians whose work supports them) working.īut what they’re working on is utter rot. The only thing Drood has going for it is that it offers work to a large cast. Would that these theaters had learned from the fate of the national tour! Thus we have two Droods running in the same month–one south, at Candlelight Dinner Playhouse in Summit, and one at Apple Tree Theatre in north suburban Highland Park. So now that Drood’s regional rights have been made available, it’s fair game for any theater desperate for new product to offer its subscribers. Most observers opined that without Rose’s star presence in the role of the show’s master of ceremonies, Drood would fail both critically and commercially–it simply wasn’t strong enough to stand on its own. In Drood’s case, the tour was cut short by (ironically, considering the show’s murder-mystery plot) the slaying of George Rose by his male lover.
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.īut The Mystery of Edwin Drood was a bona fide Broadway success a few seasons ago–the kind of success that almost always leads to a national tour.
#EDWIN DROOD BROADWAY CAST PROFESSIONAL#
The mystery is how this musical-comedy mediocrity ever got onto a professional stage in the first place. There’s a mystery to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, all right. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlife.
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