Ted Craig has resuscitated Rupert Holmes's bizarre, interactive musical that two decades ago won every award going on Broadway and then died a death in London. It works far better in a small space than it did in a large hall, but its old-tyme music-hall mode seems strangely alien to the spirit of the unfinished novel.
The presence of a gavel-wielding chairman induces a mood of raucous heartiness, and at the point where the story stops, the audience is asked to vote on a series of questions, including the identity of Drood's killer. This nod to democracy leads Stefan Bednarczyk's otherwise poised chairman into a lot of hasty paper-shuffling. It also misses the point of the novel. As Angus Wilson observed in a masterly essay, Dickens was more interested in writing a psychological case study than a whodunnit. He made it plain to his illustrator that John Jasper was the murderer; what really fascinated Dickens was the duality of a man who was both cathedral precentor and drugged mesmerist and even, arguably, a symbol of the author's own darker self.
Holmes's musical acknowledges this by giving Jasper, endowed with a saturnine strangeness by Kit Benjamin, a number about his split personality. And there are other lively songs, including a cod-Victorian ballad about the wages of sin bouncily delivered by Nicola Delaney as an opium-den queen. In fact, the whole cast, doubling as performers and musicians and spearheaded by Kate Feldschreiber as a check-trousered Drood, perform with zest. The suavely bearded Bednarczyk, who also plays the Reverend Crisparkle (whom we oddly elected as the murderer), is miles better than Ernie Wise was in the West End original. But it is a show best seen through a mild alcoholic haze: viewed stone-cold sober, it feels like very old turkey.
· Until February 24. Box office: 020-8680 4060
