THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD, SCERA Center, Orem (801-225-2569 or www.scera.org). Running time: 2 1/2 hours (one intermission).
OREM — "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" is a play within a play, a musical about a British music-hall troupe putting on a mystery — where finding out the ending is a mystery to everyone, including the cast.
The source material is the story by Charles Dickens, which was only half-finished when he died. In the 1980s, writer/composer Rupert Holmes turned it into a musical, with the audience deciding who the murderer is — or if Edwin was murdered at all.
"Clue: The Musical," in essence.
The first act is the setup — who had motive to kill Edwin Drood? Suspects include Edwin's fiancee, a jealous uncle, a mysterious foreigner who was last to see Edwin alive and many others. (Rosanna Ungerman plays Drood in reverse-drag — a woman playing a woman playing a man.)
The second act establishes a mysterious new character, a detective, and then jumps right into the ending, which is decided through democracy.
In reality, however, the murder mystery is merely the framework for everything else, as the Victorian players break down the fourth wall to talk to the audience to make quips and sing songs that have nothing to do with the play. (They do it so so often that they don't so much break it as douse it with gasoline and set it ablaze.) The show's narrator (Randy Honaker) is the ringleader in all of this, and it all plays like a vaudevillian melodrama.
The vast majority of the play is done with cheeky self-awareness, which is both its strength and its weakness.
The most entertaining moments come when Phillip Bax (Jason Evans), a minor-player, sings a song about how tough it is to play a nobody character, and when the narrator and Durdles (Tom Lamoreaux) run through a quick succession of one-liners, each topped off with a rim shot.
On the flip side, the play revolves so much around these shenanigans that one's interest in the "Drood" mystery quickly wanes. In this day and age, murder mysteries have been done to death, and the characters and setup here feel like something even "Murder She Wrote" would have rejected.
There are a couple of interesting musical numbers in the show — "The Wages of Sin," the tongue-twisting patter song "Both Sides of the Coin" — but you won't be whistling any of them while leaving the theater.
The SCERA cast members are plenty enthusiastic and seem to enjoy the interactive nature of the show. Their British accents are here in this scene and gone the next, and the melodramatic acting swings from too hammy to not hammy enough. But generally everyone pulls through nicely.
Ungerman as Drood (and as pretentious actress Alice Nutting) is great and sings beautifully. Carol Fuller as Princess Puffer also makes the most of her songs. Lamoreaux is a hoot as the boozing Durdles and Celine Morton as Helena makes a one-note character entertaining with the use of her eyes and body language.
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