The IU Department of Theatre, Drama and Contemporary Dance opens their season with a wonderfully energetic, accomplished and colorful production of Rupert Holmes musical based on the story and the wonderful characters from Charles Dickens' unfinished novel the Mystery of Edwin Drood.
It's Holmes' idea that the show is played by a British pantomime troupe. Nathan Robbins was a delight as the always active Chairman for the evening. In the pantomime tradition Edwin Drood was played by a woman, the versatile Maddie Shea Baldwin. Berklea Going was Drood's affianced Rosa Bud. Scott Van Wye was appropriately menacing as the traditional villain of the piece, John Jasper. Brian Bandura and Caroline Huerta made a colorful pair as the exotic Landless twins from Ceylon. Emily Schultheis was a warmly commanding figure as Princess Puffer, the mistress of an opium den. Christian Fary was a crowd pleaser as he innocently sang a song lamenting his lack of opportunity to sing a song.
The energetic evening of The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a display that showcases just how talented and skilled the students in IU's musical theatre program are and how they can handle the complex demands put on them by director and choreography George Pinney and music director Terry La Bolt. Diction even with English accents was very good, but in the faster pieces I did wish for the super titles that the IU Opera Theater offers. Colorful and varied costumes are by Eriko Terao and the imaginative set design with its evocation of 19th century theatre by Reuben Lucas is a pleasure to see.
One of Rupert Holmes's innovations for the show is that the playgoers gets to decide which of the more or less likely suspects is the murderer before the finale. Saturday night the mostly female majority of the audience seemed to take special delight in naming the apparently blameless heroine Rosa Bud as the culprit and she offered a reprise of the songs "A Man Could Go Quite Mad" and "No Good Can Come from Bad"
Audiences at IU's Ruth N. Halls Theatre get more chances to name the murderer it The Mystery of Edwin Drood once each evening September 30th through October 3rd and twice on Saturday the 4th with a matinee and an evening performance.
At the theatre for you, I'm George Walker