The Mystery of Edwin Drood
A conversation with Author Rupert Holmes
On November 17, 2012, as part of Roundabout Theatre Company’s lecture series, Rupert Holmes
spoke about The Mystery of Edwin Drood with Education Dramaturg Ted Sod.
An edited transcript follows:
Ted Sod: You were born in England, correct?
Rupert Holmes: I was born just outside of Manchester.
TS: And there was music in your household from a very early age. Your father was a band
leader, as I understand it?
RH: My father was an amazing musician. He taught me that there are two types of music: good
and bad. He never divided anything up into categories. My father played lead alto when he was
17 years old for a big band led by Red Norvo. When the war started, he enlisted in the army and
became an infantry division band leader. After the war, he got a job at NBC radio in the late '40s
and conducted his own pop radio show using Toscanini’s string section. When the transition from
radio to TV took place, the stress was too much for him, so he became a very dedicated high
school band leader and music teacher. He was the supervisor of music for the Nyack public school
system, which is where I went to school.
TS: You played a number of instruments as a child. Did you play sax and clarinet?
RH: I played sax and clarinet. We were not well-to-do. When I was growing up in the 1950s, my
father had to teach in six school systems simultaneously to make $3,000 a year. So we knew I
would have to get a scholarship to afford college. My father was a brilliant clarinetist and was able
to teach me to be one as well. I entered Manhattan School of Music as a clarinet major and
immediately dropped the instrument because I hated the clarinet! However, I love to write for the
clarinet now. I also played sax at that time in a rock and roll band. Like every boy my age in
America at that time, I wanted to be one of the Beatles. So I taught myself sax and piano. Even
though I wrote every note that you hear in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, I'm a really lousy piano
player. I can play this entire show, but only very slowly!
TS: You went to Syracuse University?
RH: First year was Syracuse University, I got a good scholarship there but I missed New York City.
When you grow up in the suburbs of New York, you have a very different idea of what a city is.
When I arrived at Syracuse I said, "Can you direct me to the center of the city?" and they said,
"You're standing on it." It's only a couple of blocks, you know. So, I came back here to New York.
I missed being around this scene.
TS: And then you went to Manhattan School of Music.
RH: Yes. I changed my major to theory and composition. But I quit in my junior year because my
career in the record business was taking up all my time. I wanted to write music and I wanted to tell
stories. I didn't know anyone in theatre, but I had long hair and could play guitar, piano, sax,
drums, bass, and I knew a little bit more about the technical side of music than most people my
age in rock and roll. For example, I knew how write arrangements for a band or orchestra. So, I
started working my way slowly into the music business. And by the way, for the first two years that
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I was in the business, I worked right next door to this theatre. On the fourth floor was a record
label called Scepter Records. I virtually lived in their recording studio, teaching myself how to
make records and arrange. Had I known then that someday a Broadway marquee bearing the
name of my first musical would be right next door…amazing!
TS: Will you tell us when and how you realized that you could sing?
RH: Well, there's still a lot of argument about whether I can. Although I actually had a number one
record on which I was not only the writer but the vocalist. If you've ever heard a song that goes: “If
you like piña coladas, and getting caught in the rain…” that was me. But I became a vocalist
simply to insure that someone would sing my songs. My big break came after I made my first solo
album in 1974. The phone rang one day, and a voice said, "Hi, this is Barbra Streisand. I've been
listening to your album and I really like your songs. I'd like to record some of them. And I see you
do your own arrangements so maybe you should fly out here and do the sessions with me. I'm
also doing a movie called A Star is Born so maybe you'd like to write for that." And I said, "This is
the worst Barbra Streisand impression I've ever heard!" And of course it was Barbra. I wrote,
arranged and conducted an album with her called Lazy Afternoon. Incidentally, she’s just released
a new CD called Release Me with a recording we did 30 years ago: a medley of “How Are Things
in Glocca Morra?” and “Heather on the Hill” which I arranged and conducted.
TS: "Escape" which is also known as ‘The Piña Colada Song’ was released in 1979 and had
the distinction of being the number one song in two separate years.
RH: Yes, it was the last number one song of 1979 and the first of 1980, so I was at the top of the
chart for two decades without interruption.
TS: And the record company then wanted you to record “The Daiquiri Song”...
RH: Yes, they expected me to go around wearing Hawaiian shirts and be Jimmy Buffet Junior and
that really wasn't who I was. That song was from my fifth album and is musically atypical of
anything else I've ever written, except that it tells a story and the story has a twist ending, so I was
writing a kind of musical mystery even back then. But although I went on to have a few more Top
4o singles, that one huge international hit defined me in a way that I couldn’t escape. A friend of
mine once called The Piña Colada Song the smash hit record that ended my recording career.
TS: But it didn't end your career because you were performing at Dangerfield's back when
Rodney actually still performed there. Would you tell the audience what happened one
night?
RH: Yes, I was the first music act that ever headlined at Dangerfield's, because I did a lot of
comedy leading into and often within my songs. One evening, I got passed a card that said, “Have
you thought about writing a musical? If so, we should talk.” I took that card and scotch-taped it
over my typewriter. It was from Gail Merrifield Papp, Joe Papp's wife. Obviously, Joe Papp
produced A Chorus Line and was responsible for creating The Public Theatre, the New York
Shakespeare Festival and free Shakespeare in the Park. And Gail was director of theatrical
development.
I visited Gail and Joe to tell them this idea I’d had about a musical based on Charles Dickens’
unfinished novel, a book few people had heard of at that time. I thought it might be the height of
theatricality if I could find a way for the audience to make choices that determined the ending rather
than my trying to write one lone ending for the piece. That way an audience might see a different
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ending at each performance! Gail and Joe said, “That's interesting.” And I then took off three
years of my life to write this piece.
And so I eventually stood in Joe Papp's office, he took the phone off the hook, and I performed this
entire show myself. At that time it was about an hour longer than what you saw today. Joe Papp
was the first person to vote on the ending. When I was done he said, "Here's the story. Every year
we do Shakespeare in the Park so this year you'll be Shakespeare. If it goes well there, we'll take
it to Broadway." As you can imagine, that was one of the most amazing days of my life.
TS: Also at that particular command performance for Joe and Gail was Wilford Leach.
RH: He was the original director and a gorgeous spirit. He was so open and just loved the idea of
this show, the silliness of it. We worked out a lot of the games within it together. And Graciela
Daniele was our wonderful choreographer.
TS: Could you tell us about the genesis of this musical? I just think it is brilliantly
constructed. You created meta-theater even before people were calling it that.
RH: Well, I had this idea for having the audience make choices about the ending, but it took me a
while to determine how I would make that work. One day I typed the words "Victorian Vaudeville"
at the top of a page, and it all dawned on me. Almost every unusual idea within the mechanism of
this show occurred to me in the space of an hour. My brain had probably been working on it for a
long time.
I realized that instead of trying to write a musical adaptation of Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin
Drood, I could write a musical about a marvelous theatrical company full of wonderful, hammy,
delightful, giddy, silly, scene-stealing actors. Their adaptation of Dickens’ novel could be the
greatest endeavor of their lives, and it could be a show as much about putting on a show than
about who murdered Edwin Drood. One of my favorite lines in the show is in the last number.
Stephanie sang it so beautifully just now. "I have read the writing on the wall and the greatest
myst’ry is not the hist’ry of Jasper, Drood and one and all.” Isn’t that an amazing thing to say to the
audience after they've been watching this for two-plus hours? I realized it could be a show about
the joy, honor, and thrill of being a performer.
The opening number of the show at the Delacorte in Central Park was the number that opened Act
II tonight. “An English Music Hall.” When we moved from Central Park to Broadway, Wilford said,
"Whenever we move a show from the park to a formal theatre, we get the complaint that it was so
much looser in the park, more fun, more like a picnic. Now, indoors, the complaint is always that
it's gotten stiff and stale."
So I said, "What if I were to write an opening number where all the cast is out in the audience,
talking to the patrons?” They're up in the balcony, so someone who’s got a bad seat suddenly sees
an actor who plays one of the leads standing right by them. Suddenly it's not such a bad seat after
all. And what if the song were different from most opening numbers? Most presentational opening
numbers are "Here we are! Look at us! Curtain up! We're going to shine tonight! World, watch out
for us!” What if our opening number was the absolute inverse of that? What if it's “There You Are.”
“We don't care how you got in, even if you cheated your way in through a side exit, how great it is
that you did that, because you're still here. Bless you for giving us the chance to sing for you and
perform for you. Don't move whatever you do!” And so I wrote “There You Are”, which is the right
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opening number for this show. After all, if the performers of the Musical Hall Royale weren't having
the joy of being in front of these footlights, the men would be working in a factory somewhere and
the women would be working in the street or as servants.
TS: And the Music Hall did have a reputation of appealing to all classes.
RH: Sure.
TS: And that's what the summer park shows seem to be.
RH: And I also think this cast makes this theatre feel that way. I'm not saying you were literally
transported to England in 1895 tonight, but this musical feels different than any other Broadway
show I've attended. Your presence is acknowledged before the show even starts. The show is
continually deferring to you and everything is happening for, about, and because of you. I just love
that because it's really what goes on in any play that you attend, on a more modest level. You're
always having an effect on the performers. The actors are buoyed if you are supportive. If you're
cold and remain like an oil painting, then the actors have to work the material harder, sometimes
too much so. It's a dynamic of all theatre; this show just makes a musical out of it.
TS: Can you talk about the overwhelming number of possible endings that you had to deal
with?
RH: I wrote 7,000 endings and the cast has memorized all of them. (laughs) No, here's the deal.
The math has been done for me by someone who majored in probability and statistics. There are
over 500 combinations of endings that you could have seen today. Now that doesn't mean there
are 500 different endings that I've written, but you could choose from eight murderers. So, there
are eight possible murder confessions, five possible Datcherys, 36 combinations of lovers—and
we've seen a lot of strange combinations. Last night the lovers were the brother and sister, so
there you go. We're definitely in a new millennium!
TS: But you've never had a same sex couple, that's not even possible, correct?
RH: Well, the way it is set up it can't happen. First of all, it would have created so many more
endings. You have nine available men times nine, that's 81 more combinations. The other thing is
that we're trying to be honest—honest! What a ridiculous thing I just said, we're trying to deceive
you completely and make you think you're in 1895. I meant “true to the period.” For example,
someone suggested early in the production that the audience might text their votes. That would be
very cool but then again, it would make us very aware that it’s 2012. So we vote by applause or a
show of hands and use a tie breaker when needed. It's so analog. It's so vinyl. It's so wonderfully
old-fashioned. But in 1895, the Music Hall Royale would not have given anyone the chance to pick
a man and a man or a woman and a woman as lovers. Remember that in that same year, Oscar
Wilde was sent to prison for his sexual behavior. So, to keep the illusion that we are in England in
that time, we had to rule out same sex couplings.
TS: It absolutely makes sense given the world of the play. Let's talk about this production.
As I understand it, you worked with Scott Ellis, the amazing director on this production,
before. He directed your musical Curtains, correct?
RH: Scott, the brilliant director of this production, collaborated with John Kander, Fred Ebb and
myself on a musical called Curtains, which is really on an extremely parallel track to the spirit of
this show. When we were doing Curtains, Scott said, "I'd love to do a production of The Mystery Of
Edwin Drood.” We felt like Studio 54 was the right space for it. Todd Haimes, the visionary leader
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of Roundabout Theatre Company made a commitment to me many years ago, saying, “We're
definitely going to do it if you want to do it, but we have to wait for Studio 54 to free up.”
TS: One of the wonderful things about the show is it gives almost all of the leading
characters a star turn.
RH: We say it's an ensemble show, but that isn't quite right. It's an ensemble of stars. Each
principal in the show and their understudies have the responsibility and likelihood of having to
deliver a star turn at any given performance; you just don't get to see all of them each night. I have
to tell you, when we went into this, I thought I would never ever be lucky enough to get the kind of
cast I had in the original production, but this cast has blown me away. They are absolutely
stunning. There's not a weak link in the chain. Everyone is amazing, and the covers are amazing
too. Whoever goes on is more than ready to do their confession or to be one of the lovers.
Everyone from our 14-year-old Deputy on up.
Audience Member #1: Who in your career most influenced you?
RH: I like to do new and odd things, but within very traditional formats. I have the most fun when I
break rules within a genre where the rules are strict. I talked a lot about my father, but my mother
raised me to respect great lyric writing, like that of Lorenz Hart and Noel Coward. I was very
influenced by the musical Peter Pan with Mary Martin. When I was 10 years old I would lip sync
the entire cast album of My Fair Lady. And Gilbert and Sullivan were great influences for this show
in particular. Some of the numbers in Edwin Drood could sneak into a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta
and you wouldn't ask, "What's happening?”
My favorite film composer is Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the music for Vertigo and all the classic
Hitchcock films. I hear bits of Herrmann-esque moments drifting in-and-out-of this score.
My younger brother has been an opera singer at the Met since he was nine years old. All I ever
heard from his side of the house was opera, so a lot of my grander moments in Drood live in a
place somewhere between Puccini and Bernard Herrmann. My old line is that I tried to steal from
Puccini but Andrew Lloyd Webber kept suing me.
In terms of comedy, I love British farce. Noises Off was just the most fun to watch and had a big
influence on me as well. I wrote a TV series called Remember WENN, set in the golden age of
radio that was essentially a stage farce every week. I love taking a silly idea and playing it out with
great integrity for comedy's sake.
TS: Is the Bernard Herrmann influence in the musical motif that plays every time the
Chairman says the title, The Mystery of Edwin Drood?
RH: Sure, that fanfare was the first music I ever wrote for this piece. You hear it about six times in
the show. I wrote that in 1971, 12 years before I sat down to actually compose the real thing.
Audience Member #2: Is there a collective consensus in terms of who Dickens intended the
murderer to be?
RH: My favorite quote, which gave me the liberty to abandon all my initial research on the novel,
was from Mark Twain. He was still alive when The Mystery of Edwin Drood was first published.
He said about all the theories that were raised about its outcome, "A great number of researchers
have already thrown considerable darkness on the subject and if they continue their work we shall
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soon know nothing about it at all." It is one of those works where the more you study it, the more
you come across one book that said, "Obviously it had to be this person” and another equally
sound volume saying, “Obviously it had to be that person”…
Now what is actually the most fascinating puzzle to me about The Mystery of Edwin Drood is the
identity of the detective, Datchery. There is a mention in Dickens that he has fluttery hands, just
like Helena Landless. Some people think that's a very strong clue and, if that was the case, you
voted with Mr. Dickens today.
I always wondered why Puffer follows John Jasper from her London opium den to Cloisterham. It
is never answered so I came up with the best answer I could for you, the connection being Rosa
Bud. In terms of where Mr. Dickens was going, I suspect that if Charles Dickens had lived to finish
writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood, then Robert Louis Stevenson would probably not have
bothered to write Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde some 10 years later. You have to remember that in
Dickens’s time, there were no such terms as schizophrenia. I think John Jasper would have
probably been remembered as a great villain, and instead of people saying, “You've got a
a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ personality,” they’d be saying, “You're a real John Jasper.”
TS: It is a fascinating theory. I went to see Miriam Margolyes’s one-woman show, Dickens’
Women, at the Morgan Library recently. She talked about Dickens and his affection for
several 17-year-old girls. It was very interesting that he fell in love with a younger actress
as an older man. It seems to mirror the relationship between Jasper and Rosa Bud.
RH: One of the things that saddens me greatly is that I believe Charles Dickens saw himself as
Jasper. He was perceived to be, and was, a great humanitarian, and wrote about people in a very
moving way. He cared about the downtrodden poor. People viewed him as a good and
compassionate man, and he was. But he was also using opium during the end of his life because
of injuries. He would consume two bottles of champagne during a reading of his work, and with that
he would mix opium…the laudanum that's mentioned in the novel. He was also madly in love with
his young mistress in London, Ellen Ternan.
Dickens published his own work in installments, like little magazines. The day that he finished
writing the 6th of a projected 12 installments, he went to dinner in his home outside of Rochester,
(which is the real city of Cloisterham). He stood bolt upright during the meal and said, "I must get
to London," then collapsed, dying the next day. I think he felt that the world would view him
differently if they knew he was just as flawed as everybody else, relying on drugs, being an
unfaithful husband. I always feel a bit sad because I suppose he was thinking, “I'm not as nice a
man as people think. I have a dual personality myself.”
Audience Member #3: If there are over 500 possible endings to the play, I was wondering if
you could share with us how many you actually did write?
RH: Someone once asked me, "Did you ever think of writing your own ending instead of having
the audience make it up?" Obviously, the audience doesn't make it up. There are five different
things that Datchery can reveal to you, depending on which of the five characters you pick. There
are eight different murderer's confessions. Each one has different staging, shadows, and motives.
Some are fairly serious and others are completely comical. One is absolutely absurd, but I won't
tell you which one. The lovers’ exchanges tend to be very silly and are written that way because I
learned early on that at this point in the show, a lot of you in the audience are just trying to cause
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mischief! I rarely get to see Jasper and Rosa, which I would love to see. I am always getting
Durdles with Helena and Puffer with Bazzard and Puffer with Deputy, obviously.
TS: It's a little Harold and Maude…
RH: There are 36 series of exchanges. Nothing is really ad-libbed except the fun the actors have
with the lines and any physical business that you see, which is generally their own invention. They
are encouraged to come up with their own ideas, and sometimes we've never seen what they are
doing until they do it. They’re always catching me by surprise. It's delightful because when you
have a cast this good, you are collaborating with some of the most inventive minds around. So
what I'm saying to you is that, if you want to count how many possible murderers there are, there
are eight different solutions. But really, that's coupled with five different Datcherys and more than
thirty different possibilities of lovers, so there are lots of combinations that I've never seen. There
is one murderer's confession that I've only seen once, and it was only in this run. It never
happened in the original production. It's hard to define it more clearly than that. I'm not trying to be
evasive. I hope you understand.
TS: Once the actors find out they are the murderer that night, I'm sure they are thinking,
"Oh, okay, what am I singing?"
RH: It's really scary! And I know from long runs of this show that someone will say, "I'm Datchery
tonight? How does that go? I haven't done it in 2 months!" So they have to be at the ready. The
murderer is usually informed that they’ve “won” while Puffer is singing “Garden Path to Hell.”
Unless it's Puffer or Rosa, in which case they learn as they go off while Bazzard is entering. But
my understanding is that only the murderer really knows he or she is it for sure. The rest of the cast
knows it’s not them, but they don’t know who it is, so we keep a sense of surprise and shock on
stage. There's some part of staging that I can't reveal without giving away a secret, but when we're
watching the show, we can tell who was picked about two seconds before their name is
announced. But otherwise there's no way to know.
Audience Member #4: As the sole author of this show, what part did you find most
challenging? And are there moments you are particularly fond of?
RH: Writing the orchestrations was physically the hardest thing to do. I had always done the
arrangements for my songs. If I recorded something on my own albums or with Streisand, I'd be
my own arranger and I'd conduct the session. It never occurred to me that I wouldn't do the
orchestrations of something that I composed for theatre. So I started writing the orchestrations on
my own. About a third of the way in, someone said, "Oh, by the way, who's going to be doing the
orchestration for your show?" I said, “Oh, I'm doing them.” They said "You don't do that, nobody
does that." And in truth, I don't know of any show where the composer actually did all the
orchestrations. There certainly must be some, but I don't know of any.
TS: Not even Meredith Willson!
RH: Meredith Willson, no. Stephen Sondheim uses Jonathan Tunick and Michael Starobin a lot.
Even for West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein utilized other arrangers for some of the jazz stuff.
But doing the orchestrations for The Mystery of Edwin Drood myself almost crippled my hands.
Having done it, I realized that I couldn't do it. But then it was too late, I had done it. Then I had to
re-orchestrate the score for this revival, so I had to do the thing all over again! At least this time I
didn't have to write the entire book and music and lyrics again from scratch.
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But every aspect was hard. Writing the book was hard because it was the first book of a musical I
had ever written. The lyrics were a little easier. What was wonderful about writing lyrics for Edwin
Drood was that, when you write pop songs you have to write in the language of today. When you
write a musical, you decide what world you're in and you write for that world. Like Rodgers and
Hart in Pal Joey, where Hart wrote "I'm wild again, beguiled again, a simpering, whimpering child
again, bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I." You would never be allowed to write that lyric in
2012! They'd kick you out of the room! But with Edwin Drood I could employ a vocabulary that I
would never be allowed as a pop writer. “Another trifling day, one more soul-stifling day of blinding
pain: boredom grinds my brain down to the grain.” Oh boy! “A sculptor lacking arms, a sorc'ror
lacking charms, a fiend who frightens no one for there's no one that he harms. Whose clutches
clutch at only desp'rate respite from this dim tableau! Knowing this is so…” And I just thought, “Oh
this is so easy! It was absolutely liberating.
Favorite moments? Oh there are so many. “Never the Luck.” You the audience gave that poor
Mr. Bazzard a chance to sing a song in the spotlight, out of the generosity of your heart. The
Chairman turns to you and says, "Should we let him do it?" And you said, "Yes." Or even tonight:
you let him be a murderer! You let him have the main confession. How generous you were to that
poor unassuming Victorian actor who, coming to the theatre today, quite literally didn't think he
would be the murderer unless you so deemed it. So writing an anthem for the people who never
get to “go on” was important to me. “Writing on the Wall” means a great deal to me personally
because I think it's a very simple message: that you must appreciate every moment that life allows
you. And “Moonfall” is about as immaculate a song as I know how to write. But the work as a
whole is what gives me the greatest joy.
TS: I wanted to end with Rupert telling us about what he's working on now because it's
astounding. To my count it's a book, a play and – what? -- three musicals?
RH: Monday I begin a reading of my new play (not a musical) that I've written with the approval of
the Agatha Christie estate, of Witness for the Prosecution. The reading will be directed by Doug
Hughes, who has directed a lot of wonderful Roundabout productions. Kim Catrall will be playing
the Marlene Dietrich role, if you know the movie. Roger Rees is playing the barrister. I have a play
that I did in Washington of John Grisham's famous novel A Time to Kill, so I've two courtroom
dramas in development right now. We did A Time to Kill in Washington with Sebastian Arcelus,
who is coincidentally Stephanie Block’s husband. He’s great to work with, just brilliant. And I have
a musical based on Second Hand Lions, which was a movie with Michael Caine and Robert Duvall,
set in Texas and Morocco simultaneously. That opens at The Fifth Ave Theatre in Seattle a year
from now. A musical version of The Nutty Professor is in the works, which is the last score that
Marvin Hamlisch wrote. I wrote the lyrics and book. It turned out to be a very tender, gentle and
funny show that I hope you'll see here in New York some day soon. And I am writing The Picture of
Dorian Gray, the first musical where I've written all three components of since Drood. I still have
the last 10 minutes of it to write. There's a lot going on.
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