Fall 1995: The Mystery of Edwin Drood

By: Rupert Holmes
Based on Charles Dickens' final novel

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. The show "features" an actor who never arrives (causing the master of ceremonies 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, and the entire show 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 its author. Instead, the audience solves it via a number of votes. The audience 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, and a pair of lovers selected from the remaining three, four or five principle characters of either gender. Altogether, the cast of Drood had to be ready for eight hundred possible endings.