Ben Laird Arts & Photography
The cast of Vertigo’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Vertigo scores with the stylish meta-musical Edwin Drood
Vertigo’s current offering The Mystery of Edwin Drood is one of the most beautifully staged plays I’ve seen in a long time. The "solve-it-yourself musical mystery" is a stylish show with lovely costumes and sets. In fact the production value far surpasses the quality of the actual story.
The play is based on Charles Dickens’s final unfinished novel that playwright and composer Rupert Holmes adapted for the stage. The tale is presented as a play within a play. The audience meets The Music Hall Royale a Victorian musical troupe on the opening night of its production of Edwin Drood . The chairman (Doug McKeag) narrates the evening’s proceedings as the tale unfolds.
Drood (Onalea Gilbertson) is engaged to the fair Miss Rosa Bud (Lindsey Dawn). Drood’s uncle the menacing choirmaster John Jasper (Zachary Stevenson) has also cast a romantic eye upon her as has the hot-tempered Neville Landless (David Leyshon) an immigrant from Ceylon.
However the show is just as much about the theatrics involved in putting on a play as it is about Dickens’s story with actors forgetting lines and stars storming off in a temper.
Following a Christmas Eve dinner Drood disappears. Is he alive? Is he dead? If he’s dead then whodunit? That’s one of the mysteries the audience is given to decide. When all is finished did I care who did it? Not at all. This play isn’t really about the intricacies of plot or developing connections with characters rather it’s about the infectious fun and the spectacle.
Vertigo does a fantastic job of conveying a sense of period right down to the simple technology onstage that’s used to create the show’s sound effects. The acting is also very broad. Don’t expect any subtlety on this score. Actors are caricatures not characters complete with exaggerated facial expressions and movements. Neville Landless’s sister Helena (Natascha Girgis) for example always looks mid-step in a traditional Indian dance.
Sprinkled throughout the production are nearly 20 songs with some actors doubling as musicians. While there’s a lot of zest and energy in the rousing opening number “There You Are” the rest of the score doesn’t seem to sustain the same level of interest and momentum as that first song. Dawn however did have a chance to display her highly trained soprano with some beautiful pieces written for Rosa Bud’s character.
How can a person take anything seriously in a play where the name of the opium den madame is Princess Puffer? (Played in a delightfully trampy fashion by Elinor Holt.) The audience plays along even booing and hissing the villain. The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a play of pure unadulterated silliness and its charm lies in the fact that it doesn’t try to pretend to be anything but.
