The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Vocal Selections by Rupert Holmes

The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Vocal Selections Reviews

• 
  A.J.

  Have I read this? So many times.
  
  So many.
  
  (Currently stage managing a production, I basically have to read it 2-3 times a week as I call the cues. So Many Times.)
  
  Still one of my favorite musicals, even if the structure is a bit ridiculous.
• 
  Sarah

  I've loved this musical since I was a little girl, so I was excited to have the chance to read the script to it. The language is amazingly witty and the plot is engaging. I'm glad to finally own this script.
• 
  Megan

  The script is clever and funny, and the music is gorgeous. I'm excited to perform this show!
• 
  Castor

  *Read the full play
  
  This is one of my favorite musicals. Incredibly fun, beautiful music, and on top of it, it's a choose-your-own-adventure! Excellent every time.
• 
  Kcatty

  Playing pit for this musical counts as reading it, no?
  
  I will actually review it, though. I haven't read the original (unfinished) novel but I am currently slogging my way through Great Expectations (which they are putting on next season in Brighton, tickets will be available for purchase in the next few weeks)* so I understand Dickens' style, and this play has the feel of a well-done simplification of what I can imagine is rather dense written story.
  
  This play is actually a play within a play: it portrays the Musical Hall Royale's (rather under-prepared) production of their adaptation of Dicken's novel. As such, MHR actors will break character if they forget a line, have a "clue" that the audience should notice, want the audience to sing along with their song, etc. They have their own personalities and backstories (which they tell the audience members before the play starts and during intermission) separate from the characters they play in the play-within-a-play. Two actresses cross-dress and one storms out of the theater in a huff when she doesn't get her way. The "chairman" is there to explain any omitted plot-points to the audience, and when the actor playing the mayor is found to be drunk in a pub the chairman steps in to play that role. Things like this. Also, the orchestra acts.
  
  There is minor racism (two characters expressing those views, and musical cues using stereotypical themes) but it's all within the MHR production and is mocked by the actors when they're out of character. There is also a love quadrangle between a young woman, her fiancé (they are both unenthusiastic about this), the fiancé's uncle (who is a creep and is rightfully portrayed as so - no "but she's leading him on!") and a newcomer to town.
  
  The MHR actors get to vote on whether Edwin Drood is alive or dead, and then the audience votes on who Dick Datchery is, who the murderer is and who the lovers are. ** The lovers can be whoever the audience wants: during one rehearsal we chose the chairman, who wasn't up for a vote and had to sing from the lyrics sheet; in another we tied on the women so we got lesbians; during opening night they tied on the men so we had a threesome between the vicar, the headstrong woman and the drunk; and last night's performance narrowly missed an incestual relationship between two MHR actors.
  
  A sticking point is that the score is handwritten and a mess - key signatures are only noted when they change, for example - but you get used to it.
  
  It's a very fun play to put on as well as to watch. I would highly recommend doing either.
  
  * Quote from the beginning of the second act.
  ** This means that the pit has to learn two different songs for Datchery, and seven endings for the murderer. And because the voting is kept secret we don't learn who the murderer is until about five seconds before we have to start playing their confession song.
• 
  Martin Denton

  Drood is a very rowdy, very friendly, interactive musical, with cast members chatting and visiting with the audience quite frequently; in fact, its eponymous mystery is solved by audience vote, conducted by cast members stationed in the aisles. (I've seen it more than once and it works far better in a small community theater-type setting than on a Broadway proscenium!)
  
  Composer-lyricist-librettist Rupert Holmes has cannily crafted it as a show-within-a-show: we're in a British Music Hall (and a fairly modest one, at that) in the late Victorian period; the evening's entertainment is an original musical adaptation of Charles Dickens's unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The story--which hardly matters much of the time--is constantly being interrupted: by the company's "Chairman," one Bill Cartwright, who narrates and comments on the plot; by exhortations to sing along with company favorites or to boo and hiss the villain; by the eager chorus of singers and dancers who are ready to leap, at a moment's notice, into the company's signature number "Off to the Races." (This rousing specialty is ingeniously wedged into the plot--sort of--to serve as the rousing first-act finale.)
  
  The point is, nobody's taking anything very seriously here: lapses--some planned, some perhaps accidental--are part of the brew; heady high spirits rather than strict professionalism is what's on display. The mystery, which revolves around the apparent murder of Edwin Drood, is almost an after-thought, though Holmes provides alternate endings based on the outcome of the audience vote.
  
  Not to suggest, by the way, that Holmes's work is content-free. Here is my favorite lyric from the show, which I think has some pretty sagacious advice in it:

  Once I bet my last ten pence and won.
  Twice as rich then, friends said, "Call it done."
  "How sad," I said;
  "So, that's your wildest dream, eh, then,
  "Twenty pence instead of ten?"
  I doubled up my bet again...
• 
  Dan Blackley

  Great Musical that hasn't found its audience. It is a murder/mystery/musical with the audience choosing who the murderer is at the end of the show. There are several different endings.
• 
  Pablo López

  Fantastic script, music and lyrics!