The Mystery of Edwin Drood
So musical theatre isn't normally my thing, but I thought I'd give it another shot. I mean this isn't something I had heard regularly raved about, so I figured no real word of mouth was a good thing. Not really. This is the last work of Dickens, who apparently died while writing it (I don't blame him) so it was left unfinished, leaving the audience to sort of "choose their own adventure." That may sound intriguing, but it basically comes down to voting on who you think did it for the final scene. Of course in a large group too it's rather obvious who people will vote for (and in fact you see them voting) so the end isn't too much of a mystery in the end. They did however allow us to make a happy ending as well and choose two of the remaining cast memebers to make fall in love, which led to the inevitable conclusion of choosing the brother and sister (cause as you all know Cortland loves its incest).
The whole thing is also set up as a play inside a play type thing, which is clever and adds a nice bit of humor to the whole thing as they play off this feature. I really did enjoy that part too as each actor basically plays a character who's playing a character. This leads to jockying amoung the cast memebers to get the audience to vote for them so that they can have larger roles in the outcome, which is amusing. It also lends itself to making fun of the whole overacting involved in most musicals, which is unfortunately only taken up by one memeber of the company (I guess you don't want too overdo it too much).
In the end though the novelty of having a play within a play doesn't cover up the inner play. The actual Mystery of Edwin Drood (the inner play) is boring. Quite frankly the story is dry, rather uneventful, and I lost interest in it very quickly. It suffers from what most musicals I've seen (and disliked) tend to suffer from. There is no much happening as the whole story is laid out before you without much depth to it. And of course the songs tend to offer nothing in terms of insight into the characters. Insted the songs are just there to drive home what we have already been told (and by "drive home" I mean "hammer into our skulls") and just break up what little action there is. I must also say that the music itself didn't interest me (there was one song that I did enjoy, the rest I could have done without). All this left me just waiting for the people to break character so I could see more of the interesting theatre group insted.
It wasn't all bad though, and I'm not laying the blame for any of the shortcomings on the cast/crew/orchestra. They whole crew did a fine job with it (a couple of problems here and there, but it is just a SUNY production). The blame lies with my distaste for musical theatre and the overall problems I had with the story itself. The closest thing I could compare it to is like watching Memento. Sure there's something there to enjoy with the story itself, but that's not the main attraction of the film, the way it's presented is. The story of Edwin Drood isn't the main attraction here, the presentation is. Unfortunately the story of Edwin draws so much away from the presentation that I felt like someone had taken Memento and put the scenes into chronological order, taking away all the flavor and flair.
So if you do enjoy plain stories and/or musical theatre, and/or Dickens, then maybe you'll like it. As for me, this just reaffirms my belief that musical theatre just isn't for me (other than the rare exceptions like South Park).