Most of the tunes are pegged to the show-within-the-show, which we couldn’t give a farthing about. Problems arise with Holmes’s conceit when it comes time to sing a song. (It’s a strange, dark, broken tale, with point-of-view problems enough to have Dickens scholars stabbing their eyes out with their quill pens.) That’s fine, because Dickens’s Drood, had it been finished, probably wouldn’t have ranked among the most fiendishly plotted, rapturously involving mystery stories of all time. The story - about an entitled young twit who runs afoul of the opium-puffing uncle (Chase) who covets Drood’s blossoming young fiancée (Betsy Wolfe) - is cartoonishly dismissed to make room for the antics of the music-hall cast. That’s because Holmes (who wrote book, music and lyrics) is almost entirely uninterested in the actual mystery of Edwin Drood, played at the Royale by touchy female impersonator Alice Nutting (Block). It’s a nifty gimmick, and not the least bit dramatically unsatisfying because there are no dramatic demands to satisfy. Charles Dickens was full halfway through the creation of The Greatest Mystery Novel Of Our Time, when he committed the one ungenerous deed of his noble career: He Died, leaving behind not the slightest hint as to the outcome he had intended for his bizarre and uncompleted puzzle: The Mystery Of Edwin Drood.” The audience, it’s announced, will ultimately be asked to vote the outcome of the story with their applause. He welcomes us to the evening’s festivities, explaining that “Mr. The Chairman (a wonderful Norton, shivving us sideways with perfectly delivered wisecracks) is our emcee. (After too many months of depressing American democracy, there’s nothing more refreshing than a draught of its clammy English cousin.)Ī primer on this “Musicale with Dramatic Interludes”: Drood is a show-within-a-show unfolding among the company of “London’s Music Hall Royale” in 1895. You emerge, as if from a diet-opium dream, remembering only the great fun you had in Act Two, when the comfy audience rapport established in Act One pays off, the general atmosphere of stage-managed-anarchy belatedly intoxicates us, and we all get to vote for our favorite murderer. Under the brisk direction of Scott Ellis, these are performers with power enough to make you forget the tedium of Act One, with its sweetly dithering, operetta-etta score, its sandstorms of fussy, cluttered lyrics, and near-complete absence of compelling melody. Block, Jessie Mueller, and, as the sour cherry on top, Chita Rivera), this is high praise indeed. So when I say the Roundabout’s new revival of Drood adds up to a perfectly diverting evening, featuring an uncommonly fine assemblage of stage talents (among them Jim Norton, Will Chase, Stephanie J. Nor do I love the beery atmosphere of oom-pah-pah and bottom-pinching and double-entendrification quite enough to guarantee automatic affection for The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Rupert Holmes’s frilly, frisky, doily-thin 1985 meta-burlesque of Charles Dickens’s final, mythically unfinished novel. Who doesn’t love an English music hall? Well, I don’t, actually - not the music part, at least. Ī writing contest was hosted for several years in the town of Brattleboro to commemorate the hoax publisher, and will be re-launched in October of 2022.Photo: Joan Marcus / Roundabout Theatre Company Subsequent scholarship has later debated the authenticity and similarity of the work to the original Dickens. With a successful marketing campaign, the book became an item of comment in the literary community, with an essay by Arthur Conan Doyle in The Bookman negatively comparing the continuation of the novel with the original work. The book, published in 1873 under the title Part Second of the Mystery of Edwin Drood, was reviewed by the New York Times, as well as regional newspapers, like the Salem Observer. James) was a publisher in Brattleboro, Vermont best known for publishing a completion of Charles Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood claimed to be written by the spirit of Dickens channeled through a spiritualist summoning.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |