From the Dickens work, Holmes took the central plot and most of the featured characters. Following a nightclub appearance during which Holmes performed some of his "story-songs" while sharing humorous anecdotes, Holmes received a note from Gail Merrifield, director of play development at the New York Shakespeare Festival (and wife of Joseph Papp, the creator and head of the Festival), who had seen Holmes's performance and suggested that he write a full-length musical.ĭrawing on his recollections of pantomime and Dickens's novel, as well as later experiences with Victorian-style music hall performance, Holmes conceived the central premises of the show. Holmes, a well-known popular songwriter whose songs had been performed by the likes of Barbra Streisand, and who had himself recorded the #1 hit "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" in 1979, first became interested in writing a musical in 1983. Both of those seminal experiences would go on to have a major impact on Holmes when he was first approached to write a new musical by impresario Joseph Papp. Some years later, as an 11-year-old boy fascinated by mystery books, Holmes first discovered the unfinished Dickens novel. At age three, he would experience theater for the first time when he was taken to a modern "panto", complete with cross-dressing lead boy and audience sing-alongs. Rupert Holmes, who would go on to be the major creative contributor to the musical Drood, spent his early childhood in England. Almost immediately after the publication of Dickens's last episode, various authors and playwrights (including Dickens's own son) attempted to resolve the story with their own endings: by the time of the Drood musical's production, there had been several "collaborations" between the late Dickens and other novelists, numerous theatrical extrapolations of the material, and three film adaptations of the story.Ĭontemporaneous with Dickens's writing, British pantomime styles - distinguished by the importance of audience participation and conventions like the principal boy - reached their height of popularity, just as music hall performance with its attributes of raucous, risque comedy and a distinctive style of music began to achieve prominence.
The lack of resolution to the mystery (and the absence of notes that would indicate Dickens's intentions) have made The Mystery of Edwin Drood a literary curiosity. The book, which had been written and published in episodic installments (as had most of Dickens's other novels) was left unfinished upon Dickens's sudden death from a stroke that year.
The musical Drood is derived from two major inspirations: Charles Dickens's final (and unfinished) novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and the British pantomime and music hall traditions that reached the height of their popularity in the years following Dickens's death.ĭickens's Mystery began publication in 1870.
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