“Edwin Drood was missing: to end with.”
Charles Dickens, whose A Christmas Carol opens with the line “Marley was dead: to begin with,” might have written the above sentence, but when he died in 1870, he had completed less than half of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and so the mystery of its story remains unresolved.
For a century and a half, Drood has mystified and intrigued readers and theater audiences. A musical version premiered in New York in 1985 and in London in 1987, with Betty Buckley heading the Broadway cast that also included singer Cleo Laine.
In a rare undertaking for one person, Rupert Holmes wrote the music, lyrics, and book, and did the orchestrations as well, for the multiple Tony Award-winning show — and the first Broadway musical to have multiple endings. Because Dickens never finished his novel, the musical is written to have many possible conclusions, voted on by the audience during a break in the performance.
After productions by Foothill Music Theatre in 2020 (days before the COVID shutdown) and San Jose’s 3Below Theatres in 2018, Drood is now returning to the San Francisco Bay Area, produced by an organization devoted to two English contemporaries of Dickens — W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan.
That organization is San Francisco’s Lamplighters Music Theatre, founded in 1952 by Orva Hoskinson and Ann Pool MacNab. Lamplighters has not only served Gilbert and Sullivan faithfully for seven decades but also ventured into adventurous variations.
Causing only minor controversy, and gaining new audiences in the process, Lamplighters has moved The Mikado to Italy, commissioned and presented a musical about the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and created a new version of Princess Ida, unsatisfied with the traditional approach to what the company described as “cross-dressing princes and the feminists who love them.”
Lamplighters’ presentation of Drood begins May 4–5 at Hayward’s Douglas Morrison Theatre and then moves to San Francisco’s Presidio Theatre for a long run May 11–19. Two special events are the May 11 performance, at which all eight confessions will be sung, and the May 19 show, which will be simulcast.
With new Artistic Director M. Jane Erwin staging the production, and new Resident Music Director Brett Strader conducting, this will be the first Lamplighters show by the company’s new artistic team.
In the musical, which is set in a late-19th-century London music hall, Edwin Drood is played by a woman in male drag, a reference to the English music hall tradition of casting a celebrated actress in the role of a young man. The precedent for this is the pantomime tradition, where the “lead boy” would be portrayed by a young woman in male drag — allowing for a love song to be sung by two sopranos.
Even if Dickens’s novel is named after Drood, he is not the major character. The focus is on his uncle, John Jasper — chorus master and opium addict — who lusts after Drood’s fiancee, Rosa Bud. Another important character is Neville Landless, who is also after Rosa and clashes with Drood, who soon disappears, leaving more suspects behind than an Agatha Christie novel.
Taking the principal roles in Lamplighters’ production are Nathanael Fleming (Jasper), Wayne Wong (Durdles), Randy Lee (Neville), Noah Evans (Bazzard), Jill Wagoner (Chairwoman), Mark Robinson (Crisparkle), Grace Margaret Craig (Drood), Edward Im (Deputy), Natalia Hulse (Rosa), Kristen Tansey (Wendy), Kathleen Moss (Puffer), Kristen Jones (Beatrice), and Monica Rose Slater (Helena).
