The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a musical comedy about a theatre company attempting to stage a musical comedy of the story that Charles Dickens was writing when he died.
So of course, it is an ideal show for Wildwood, a theatre company that comes together for about three months every year to attempt to stage a musical. Except for the minor complications caused by a American youth theatre company in 1994 staging a 1986 musical comedy (which won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Book and Score) about an English theatre company in 1892 staging a musical based on a depressing, convoluted and unfinished book from 1869 which itself was set in about 1854.
Naturally it was a blast, both to stage and to watch*.
Aside from the fact that the show "features" an actor who never arrives (causing the master of ceremonies (Matt Berman) to be unceremoniously dumped into the proceedings) and an out-of-town prima donna "male impersonator" in the title role who storms off the stage and quits the show just before intermission (Jennifer Norkin), the entire machinery comes to an absolute halt in mid-song about two-thirds of the way through the second act, since the story was never finished, and the mystery of who killed Edwin Drood was never solved by the dear departed Dickens.
So of course, the audience has to solve it.
By means of voice votes, shows of hands and ballots, the audience each performance chooses from among five possible "Datcherys" (a clearly disguised "detective" who has been snooping around the second act in a long coat and a beard), seven possible murderers (actually there are eight, but the character selected for Datchery is naturally eliminated as a suspect), and a pair of lovers selected from the remaining three, four or five principle characters of either gender. With the caveat that the murderer cannot sing the love song, the number of possible endings for a given show is six hundred and sixty-five. But across all performances, the cast of Drood had to be ready for eight hundred possible endings!
The most popular ending for Wildwood audiences was Bazzard (Mike Wood), a hilarious minor character lunging for stardom through overacting, as Datchery, the Rev. Crisparkle, a horrifically and only partially repressed vicar (Quinn McCord), as the murderer, and the brother and sister pair, Helena and Neville Landless (Talia Segal and Greg Hall) as the disgusted-with-the-audience incestuous lovers. But over the course of the run, all the candidates for Datchery, all the murder suspects save one (no one suspected the Princess Puffer (Jennifer Zakroff)), and all the lovers stepped into the spotlight at least once.
What made this show worth learning hundreds of endings just in case they might be used? I'd have to say it was the incredible ensemble feeling. The show is underneath about the theatre company, and we took that idea and inflated it to the point of bursting, with the result that all the members of the cast, whether they had lines in the script or not, had developed plausible personae and complicated interactions with each other and with audience members. And so, from the pre-overture appearance of the cast mingling amongst the audience to the final bows, there was always a tremendous amount going on, all of it funny, and most of it on purpose.
The "production values" for the show were quite high, thanks to producer Blake Reid and the "off-county" space choice of Bullis, a private Potomac school. The costumes (Rachel Fink) were especially good at evoking the period, and the set (Alison Furlong) and lights (Loren Sklar), although constrained to the narrow cafeteria space, pulled off some quite nice effects.
For those who keep track of such things, the Dream Ballet took place in the song "Jasper's Vision" (Act I) and featured various flavors of fog, several succubae, Darrin Molovinsky and Pete Niner as hallucinations of John Jasper (Mike Klein). Stranger in Paradise was sung by the Princess Puffer as the coda to "The Wages of Sin", and The Chicken appeared as part of Datchery's unmasking (?) in Act II.
Drood was the first show I ever watched that many times and never hated it.
- Dan Rinzel
Director, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (WST 94).
The
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