The Mystery of Edwin Drood Book, Music and Lyrics by Rupert Holmes CAST Amy Alvarez as Edwin Drood Vatican Lokey as John Jasper Ann Casey as Princess Puffer Terri Gervais as Helena Landless Russell Hodgkinson as Neville Landless Bert Pigg as Rev. Crisparkle Ruth Ann Wild as Rosa Bud Patrick Gendusa as Bazzard Dane Rhodes as Durdles Clayton Mazoué as Deputy Johnathan Frick as The Stage Manager

MAGICAL ‘MYSTERY' TOUR
'Edwin Drood' is a rollicking good time at Le Petit

It's something to see, hear and experience, this "Mystery of Edwin Drood." It's a whole other world, in fact.

Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre has magically metamorphosed into the Music Hall Royale, a variety theater in 1873 London. Costumed actors wander the aisles before the show, conversing with the audience in lower-class British accents.

Onstage, the actors step out of character and bow as they're introduced. They pose, posture and declaim their lines melodramatically, address saucy comments to individual audience members and bully us into participating en masse. And damned if we don't, clapping in unison, singing along and voting on which of the multiple outcomes of Charles Dickens' unfinished final novel is performed. Audience participation unexpectedly becomes audience elation.

Composer-lyricist-book writer-arranger Rupert Holmes doesn't miss a trick in "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." This rollicking, ingenious and entertaining musical theater oddity is receiving an exemplary production at the Little Theatre, where a splendid cast and a remarkable evocation of a bygone theatrical form amount to an embarrassment of rialto riches.

Holmes' musical styles veer from ripe operetta to catchy, good-time group numbers which the hammy Royale actors are all too eager to perform. The lovely "Perfect Strangers" is the closest the show got to a quasi-hit song, but "Don't Quit While You're Ahead" offers that peculiar blend of jaunty optimism and yearning that inform the best show songs. And there are wonderful numbers ("Out on a Limerick," "No Good Can Come From Bad") that allow performers to strut their vocal stuff.

The concept's conceit is that the Royale has set Dickens to music, leaving the outcome of the piece to an audience vote. So we decide who the killer is, who winds up with whom, etc. One drawback to this gimmick is that the voting, multiple revelations and not-always inspired ad-libbing make the ending quite a drawn-out affair, contributing to the show's nearly three-hour running time. But mostly, it's time well spent.

Collectively and individually, this company of players is "a little bit of all-right." If Eddie Collins seems youngish for Mr. Cartwright, chairman of the music hall for 11 years (the amusing program-within-the program informs us), he is also a bouncing ball of energy with a trickster's gleam in his eye who takes center stage with smarmy ease and keeps the show moving.

The part of leading man Clive Paget, who plays the scheming Uncle Jasper, the choirmaster-dope fiend, is made to order for Vatican Lokey, whose slyly stylized, self-infatuated performance is satiric perfection. That he sings superbly ("A Man Could Go Quite Mad") is icing on the comic cake. Lokey and his characters get a run for their money in Victor Grinstead/Neville Landless, played by Russell Hodgkinson with preening panache and endless florid flourishes.

Part of the multilayered fun is that the feelings of the music hall actors often color the characters they're portraying, as in the running gag where one and all hoot when ingenue Deirdre Peregrine's character of Rosa Bud is described as innocent and virginal. (The program says that Deirdre has been "engaged at various times to most of our existing male company"). Ruth Ann Wild's Rosa Bud offers a sweetly soaring soprano and the very image of a Victorian heroine in early bloom, nicely contrasted with her Deirdre, a backstage blossom too often plucked.

The show has a great, grinning bawd in Ann Casey, the distilled essence of raffish iniquity who crows "The Wages of Sin" with knowing gusto. Her Angela Prysock, "grand dame of the Royale," plays Princess Puffer, obliging proprietress of an opium den. Amy Alvarez, as the stellar "male impersonator" who plays Edwin Drood, is a forceful, fetching little powerhouse, while Terri Gervais outdoes even the "Cobra Woman" of Maria Montez as the determinedly exotic Janet Conover/Helena Landless.

Dane Rhodes' Nick Cricker/Durdles takes low comedy to hitherto unplumbed depths. He is crude, lewd and often quite funny, and along with Casey, an audience favorite. (At the performance I caught, they were selected as "The Lovers," proceeding to do things never before seen on the Le Petit stage, at least not before a paying audience.) Clayton Mazoue, as Rhodes' daft son, displays a lanky, loose-limbed, knockabout exuberance, Patrick Gendusa is a hapless actor who finally gets a moment to shine, Bert Pigg the character man whose jokes fall with a dependable thud.

Wizardly designer Bill Walker has provided an exceptional antique theater environment, with footlights and beautifully painted (by scenic artist Michelle Levine) curtains, drops and set pieces. His contribution extends beyond the stage to the auditorium's faux walls and boxes, where costumed patrons react to the show.

Directors Sonny Borey and Derek Franklin have whipped this sprawling shebang into rowdily spiffy shape. There is period flavor and knock-'em-dead drive to Karen Hebert's choreography, danced especially well by Mazoue, Franklin and Kevin Champagne. Linda Fried's costumes have a bright, vintage look, particularly notable in clotheshorse Grinstead's flashy ensembles.

With all the attention to authentic detail, one wonders why the band is again offstage instead of down front. The shadow play re-enactments of the crime don't work especially well, and too many lyrics were lost since the sound blend of music to voice wasn't always achieved in proper ratio opening weekend.  Still, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" is unusual musical theater and at Le Petit, it is unusually rewarding as well.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

In The Mystery of Edwin Drood, (with one more held-over weekend at Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre June 22 & 23) the audience is called upon to vote for the murderer of the title character near the conclusion of this three hour 1986 musical comedy by Rupert Holmes (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 by Charles Dickens from 1869 which itself was set in about 1854.

While Mr. Holmes' book is inventive to a fault, his score, trying to be Sondheim sophisticated with a Gilbert and Sullivan gloss, is an unmemorable mishmash.

The polling of the audience, which occurs late in the second act, not only is used to let the audience select the story's lovers (a popularity contest which I imagine was won at every single performance by the show's low comedians, Ann Casey as Princess Puffer, the madam of an opium den, and Dane Rhodes as the dirty, raggety Cockney gravedigger Durdles, who won opening night), but also to select the murderer of Edwin Drood from six cast members and, opening night, this was one of the lesser luminaries - C. Patrick Gendusa playing a minor character named Mr. Philip Bax who then sings a song called "Out On A Limerick" which wraps up all the loose ends in Gilbertian patter impossible to understand (each of the other six had to learn a similar song with different words). Actually, Mr. Gendusa is playing Bazzard, the actor in the English Music Hall Royale, like all the cast members, who then play a role in the unfinished story of Edwin Drood. Quite confusing.

And as the conceit unrolls - on an impressive set filled with highly detailed nineteenth century drop and wing sets designed and lit by Bill Walker and painted expertly by Michelle Levine (excellent fare upon which the talented company dines voraciously) - the confusion mounts.

The title role of Edwin Drood is played by an actress who, supposedly, specializes in male impersonation. No amount of crepe hair is going to turn the rail thin Amy Alvarez into a believable male. Indeed, she is also the only member of the strongly cast, very professional company who is not able to sustain a believable English accent; the rest of the cast, however, sound very limey.

And what company co-directors Derek Franklin and Sonny Borey have amassed: Terri Gervais and Russell Hodgkinson playing a Ceylonese brother/sister team to scene-stealing perfection, the over-the-top Vatican Lokey as the opium-addicted voice teacher who is Edwin Drood's uncle, in love with the same young virgin Edwin is, beautiful soprano Ruth Ann Wild as the ingenue, Rosa Bud (who suffers from poor lyric pronunciation in her several songs), and Eddie Collins as the too young mutton-chop whiskered emcee whose job it is to impart some sense to the bizarre proceedings, plus the journeyman actor/non-singer Bert Pigg as a pompous preacher and Clayton Mazoue. Even co-director, musical director Derek Franklin is an enthusiastic member of the large chorus.

 Linda Fried's colorfully correct costumes add greatly to the evenings' overblown festivities which begin 30 minutes before the tentative strains of the opening song as the cast frenetically vie with one another to see who can be the most obnoxious in schmoozing the hapless audience members as they try to read their programs and otherwise settle in.

That invisible orchestra, under the capable direction of Jay Haydel, stuck somewhere upstairs in another room entirely, with its notes piped in and mixed with the singers' bugged voices, is the one element missing from designer Walker's nineteenth century music hall which cries out for an orchestra pit. The resulting feedback squawks keep the proceedings very much in the present.

This and the fact that the music is completely forgettable are mere quibbles when compared to the overall entertainment value the so-called "dream team" of directors Borey-Franklin, crackerjack choreographer Karen Hebert, designers Walker and Freid and conductor Haydel once again have concocted. Could Edwin bring them yet another Big Easy award? Stay tuned.