Detection Kit the Mystery of Edwin Drood

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Charles Dickens died having finished only half of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and that tantalizing incompleteness has prompted countless attempts to round off the novel's Gothic plot. The story echoes Dickens' familiar themes of unspoken sexual obsession, middle-class hypocrisy and the crushing burden of guilty secrets. It also contains some of his wittiest portraits of pomp and vanity. Fans of the book will look in vain for more than vague resemblances in the amiable musical version that opened on Broadway last week. Composer- Author Rupert Holmes has framed Drood within a Victorian music-hall pastiche, and the actors play both Dickens' characters and the rowdy, self- mocking buskers of a troupe nearly as atrocious as the Crummles company in Nicholas Nickleby. Much of the rambling tale survives, but the wry tone, the hallmark of Dickens' work, does not.

Taken on its own terms, however, Drood is vivacious, funny and richly tuneful, and it has an irresistible gimmick: the song and dance comes to a halt in mid-syllable to mark where Dickens' novel breaks off. The audience then votes to select the murderer and therefore the ending. This do-it- yourself detection has been honed since last summer's tryout by Director Wilford Leach and Choreographer Graciela Daniele, the team that made a zonked- out Pirates of Penzance a 1981 Broadway triumph. Fully half of Holmes' songs are instantly hummable, notably the sweet Perfect Strangers and the plucky Don't Quit While You're Ahead. The show's style calls for singing and charm more than acting. That is just what it gets from Jazz Great Cleo Laine and Broadway Veterans Patti Cohenour, Betty Buckley and especially George Rose as a smug, unflappable M.C.