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| Photo By Mark Lyons |
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Director Aubrey Berg turns a crowd of
actors in Edwin Drood into an entertaining scene.
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Charles Dickens wrote a lot of great
novels.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood was not one of them. It's
most remembered because the Victorian novelist died while writing
it, which led to a lot of speculation about how it might have ended.
Dickens expired before resolving many elements of plot or the
purpose of several characters.
That didn't stop Rupert Holmes, who translated Dickens' truncated
tale into a musical in 1985. UC's College-Conservatory of Music
(CCM) is offering a sparkling, energetic production of it through
Sunday. Inspired by the novel's incompletion, Holmes stops the
action midway through Act II (at the point where Dickens stopped his
own action) to invite the audience to vote on several issues and
possible outcomes. The various permutations mean the play can end in
several different ways, although there's enough structure that the
same music is used regardless. (And one might suspect that the
voting itself is questionable.)
Holmes also chose to set the telling of the tale as if it were
being acted by a theater troupe in 1873, around the time of the
novel's creation, at London's Music Hall Royale. The company's
chairman introduces the theater's stars who play roles in the story;
they take bows and return to the complex tale. Drood is played by a
woman, billed as a renowned male impersonator. There's a constant
urge by the large company toward distraction -- they keep wanting to
sing a song called "Off to the Races," and finally get their way --
and a serious impulse to ham it up and push roles beyond mere
melodrama to hysteria personified. It makes for a lot of noisy
hilarity.
No one is better at managing this kind of anarchy than Aubrey
Berg, head of CCM's Musical Theater Department. In scene after
scene, he directs the most amazing mobs -- there are nearly 30
performers in the show -- into pictures that are not only amusing
and entertaining, they are marvels of balance and theatricality. In
fact, there's no escape from the cast: They're in the lobby before
the show and in the aisles at intermission -- in costume and in
character -- coaching the audience on the "dangerously democratic"
process that determines the outcome, in addition to advancing their
own candidacy for specific roles. It's a charming chaos.
That chaos gets out of hand at times, and it's not always easy to
follow the action. Of course, it doesn't matter much. The program
offers a synopsis, but it's apparent this is more about tomfoolery
than a coherent dramatic structure. The Mystery of Edwin
Drood is a top-notch vehicle to showcase performers, and that's
what this CCM production offers.
Six key roles are double-cast. Among those I saw, Geoffrey
Packard shone as the half-mad uncle of Drood, in love with his
nephew's fiancée, Rosa Bud, performed with operatic clarity by
Ashley Brown. Lindsay Juneau and Kyle McDaniel portrayed a
suspiciously sinister brother-sister pair from Ceylon, and Doug
Barton was the evening's emcee, a circus ringmaster with the animals
on the loose. Daniel Percefull was the seemingly mousy Bazzard who
blossoms into a star with "Never the Luck."
Among the cast handling singular roles, Gina Restani clearly
relished playing Drood and the male-impersonating actress with diva
tendencies. Betsy Wolfe was perfectly blowsy as the Princess Puffer,
a dissolute former nanny now running an opium den. Gabriel Ford and
Jonathan Parks-Ramage laid on the comic humor (as if this production
needed another dollop of that!) as Durdles and the Deputy, a pair of
low-lifes.
The biggest challenge for this show is focus. It doesn't offer
much, and Berg and company haven't tried too hard to find it: It's
an entertaining extravaganza, full of music, dancing and high
spirits. And that makes for a great night in the theater. Grade:
B+
THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD, presented by UC's
College-Conservatory of Music, continues through Sunday at Patricia
Corbett Theater.
