Hubbard Hall’s ‘Edwin Drood’ wastes a lot of good talent

CAMBRIDGE, N.Y. » Hubbard Hall has promoted their production of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” as a new, revised one-act “90-minute lightning quick” version of the musical that in 1986 won the Tony Award for Best Musical.

The original production, which was performed in two acts had a running time of about 2 1/2 hours. The Hubbard Hall “chamber version” runs 2 hours and 29 minutes, and still has an intermission. So much for the editing.

As for “lightning quick,” that’s another exaggeration. The Hubbard Hall production drags and seems very, very long. Endless might be a more accurate term.

It’s too bad that the promises about shortening the piece were not kept. In today’s world, what was once flamboyant fun now seems a bloated, disjointed piece of theater desperately in need of cutting. There’s little doubt that at 90 or 100 minutes the still clever conceit about completing Charles Dickens’ novel, which he died while writing, would be a lot of fun. At its current length it’s not so much fun.

But the fact is — even in this too long version there is fun to be had. The major problem is that it’s too sporadic. Because Dickens only completed half the book, all we have is exposition, the introduction of characters and hints of a motive for numerous people to have reason to murder Edwin Drood. Indeed, because the work ends when Drood disappears, presumed to have been murdered, the mystery hasn’t even started.

Creator Rupert Holmes approaches the story as if it was told as a music hall music review. This offers opportunity to add a lot of vaudeville-type songs, dance numbers and comic bits. This makes it perfect material for Hubbard Hall which was built in 1878.

But, though enjoyable, the entertainments do not move the story along and take the audience out of the tale about Drood. Adding to the problem, the performers each play at least two roles — the character in the Drood story and the person playing a character. The dual identities leave you further distracted.

While the concept and performances are often clever, there are too many times it is merely tedious. Theater has changed in 30 years. Contemporary theater tastes and attention spans are now geared to 90-minute works that tell a story with laser-like focus. Plays like Drood, no matter how creative the premise, seem discursive and rambling.

This is not to say Holmes hasn’t made any changes for the Hubbard Hall production. There is a new opening that says the troupe is stranded in Cambridge in 1895 and is performing the piece to earn passage back to England. The ensemble has been eliminated and the story is told with 11 principles.

Also, the key element to the show’s popularity remains. When the troupe hits the spot to where Dickens died, they turn to the audience and ask them to vote on the ending they prefer. Though clever and potentially funny, un- less you care about Edwin Drood, you can’t care about who killed him. At Hubbard Hall after the second hour you don’t care about anything besides leaving the theater. And anything that keeps you from the exit is an irritation.

It’s all too bad. The cast at Hubbard Hall is game and talented — though even they seem adrift much of the time. The same can be said for David Snider’s direction which is often imaginative, but more often seems a matter of filling dead spaces. Costumes are terrific, the band is excellent and the music is better than the story.

It’s a case of a lot of good talent going to waste. If you have ever been at a show when a comic overstays his material going from funny to dull — you have some idea of what it’s like to experience the Hubbard Hall production of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”.