‘Drood’s!’ Holmes’ Has a Talent for Handling Every Little Detail

“Drood!,” the musical that begins a 20-performance run in the Pasadena Civic Auditorium on Wednesday night (with the official, medals-will-be-worn opening on Saturday night), is the work of Rupert Holmes.

Work is the key word. Holmes, a bearded, bespectacled 40-year-old of elfin wit and avalanche drive, wrote the book, the music, the lyrics and the orchestrations: the 650 pages of orchestrations, millions of dots splattered on sheets of barred paper.

“I went a bit blind,” Holmes said the other afternoon over a lime-enhanced glass of mineral water. “The bars started levitating off the page. On doctor’s orders, I had to sit staring into the dark for hours, until my eyes got used to quiet again.”

Holmes wrote most of “Drood!” between midnight and 5 in the morning, as a speculative lark after the day’s work was done. “ ‘Now you get to write the silly thing,’ I’d tell myself.”

His day work was also musical. He has done seven albums of his songs, the most memorable single being “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” from 1979. He arranged and co-produced a big-selling album, “Lazy Afternoon,” for Barbra Streisand and--in between preparations for the West Coast premiere of “Drood!”--is working with her again on a “Broadway II” album of lesser-known show tunes.

He’s also done albums with Barry Manilow and Dionne Warwick and has spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, a feat complicated by his devout fear of flying. He commuted often by train: “The Broadway Limited to Chicago, the Super Chief to the Coast, when you still could. It was wonderful.”

It is now an item of show business legend that he was running for the train in 1971, paused at a book rack for a mystery and, for want of anything he hadn’t recently read, seized Charles Dickens’ “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” and pondered its possibilities during the four-day ride.

“Drood” really is a mystery. Dickens died in 1870 in the midst of writing it. He had finished 22 chapters, or six of the 12 monthly magazine installments in which it was appearing. Over the century since, many authors and scholars have speculated on how Dickens meant to resolve the plot. As recently as 1980 the English author Leon Garfield wrote 19 new chapters, concluding the work in quite a fair emulation of Dickens’ style.

Holmes lets the audience resolve the story, voting each night on who the villain is. (It is not even absolutely clear that there is a victim, although the discovery of his bloody jacket does hint that young Drood is much the worse for wear, wherever he may be and if he is still extant at all.)

“It’s a two-act musical, but with all those alternate endings I had to write the equivalent of three acts,” Holmes says. When changes were made during rehearsals, Holmes had, with all else, to rush home and do new arrangements. “I was going crazy,” he says with great cheer.

The idea of doing a musical based on “Drood” arrived early, but Holmes confesses he made a couple of false starts, which were dark and somber, as indeed much of the Dickens “Drood” is.

Then, in one of those moments of inspiration that give you 7-Up instead of 6-Up and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” instead of “Robert and Maria,” Holmes conceived the idea of “a shameless music hall company” that would be doing a pocket version of “Drood” and would in its Dickensian disreputability somehow reinforce the period feeling of the story.

“I remember Bob Newhart telling a story about making a film called ‘Cold Turkey,’ ” Holmes says. “It was miserably hot and everyone was complaining except Edward Everett Horton, who sat with a beatific smile on his face. Bob or somebody asked him why he was so happy and he said, ‘I’m working !’ ” Holmes thought the secret of the music-hallers would be that they were working and that it beat being on the streets.

“The bartender might do a little pandering on the side, and the soubrettes be available for after-hours engagements, but just now they are working. “

Joe Papp of Shakespeare in the Park heard of Holmes’ work in progress and arranged an audition of Act I. He proposed several of the castings, including George Rose as the chairman, or emcee, a role he is repeating in Pasadena.

The show played a month in Central Park in the summer of 1985 and was such a smash it transferred to Broadway. After Pasadena it will open at the Kennedy Center in Washington in early April and then tour the country.

Holmes was born in England where his father, a classical clarinetist who was then a GI, had met and married an English woman. The family came home to Nyack, N.Y., when Holmes was 3.

He dutifully took up the clarinet but hated it because it was an item of duty. “The clarinet was always all the ball games I’d had to miss.” He taught himself the piano and other instruments and found them fun because they were his choices. “They were like ‘Drood,’ my treat to me.”

Music won him a scholarship to Syracuse University, where one of his chores was doing arrangements for the band. He also played piano in the pit of a burlesque house. He left the university after only a year in favor of the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied composition and arranging.

He got a job with a music publishing firm for $75 a week. He once told an interviewer he could have had $100 a week but, at the lesser price, they agreed to listen to his songs. He is a performer who in his nightclub act used to play “Begin the Beguine” as an homage to Artie Shaw (“the Fred Astaire of the clarinet”). He can play 17 instruments.

Just now he is working on a new musical, called “From Time to Time,” about the big band era. As before, he is doing the orchestrations as he goes along.

“Otherwise,” Holmes says, “it’s like a painter giving up his palette. By the time I’ve finished a song, the orchestration is in my head. And in the time it would take me to tell an orchestrator what I want, I can do it myself.”

Holmes has written jingles and everything else, for all the known media, but he appears to have found a home on stage. “If there were a law against pageantry, the human race would wither away. What would we do if we couldn’t put on masks?”

“Drood!” in Pasadena is an offering of California Music Theatre.