Theydunit Trinity Rep’s masterful Mystery of Edwin Drood BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Theater can solve any puzzle. That’s what The Mystery of Edwin Drood tells us, not whodunit, in Trinity Repertory Company’s delightful current production (through October 9).

Playwright Rupert Holmes took a trite piece of melodrama that Charles Dickens left unfinished at his death, devised a perfect framework for the truncated story, and added songs and whimsy. Director Amanda Dehnert and the inventive Trinity Rep troupe have taken that opportunity and spun a giddy collective entrancement that could have us linked arm in arm singing "I’m Henerey the Eighth, I Am" if it would amuse them.

But lucky us, we get to be even more amused than the cast in this English music hall folderol, watching a spunky British troupe whirl like dervishes and introduce quirky characters and mustachio-twirling dastardliness until we are ready, in Act Two, to decide who killed Edwin Drood.

Action swirls around the new permanent upstairs theater space, with on-stage bleachers stage left and three performance platforms scattered about the audience. (It was configured by Trinity’s seminal set designer Eugene Lee, despite a fixed stage being anathema to his cherished preference of starting with a big empty box. But the measure will save a fortune by not having to reinvent — and reconstruct — the wheel for every production.) Choreography by Sharon Jenkins and music direction by Tim Robertson brighten the atmosphere and brisk-up the pace.

The most charming invention here is the rediscovery of traditional music hall intrusiveness. A "give a big hand for the little lady" sort of introduction is made after every character’s opening lines, narrative flow be damned. Conducting these favor-currying interruptions — and we wouldn’t want to miss a single one of them — is Mr. William Cartwright, billed as Your Chairman. Brian McEleney is a double-duty choice for the role, giving the company manager by turns underlying dignity and fun-loving verve.

The Chairman serves as sideshow barker for a colorful company of actors we get to know in their private personalities as well as their character roles. Drood is played by Miss Alice Nutting (Rachael Warren), in the 19th-century stage tradition of cross-dressed female actors. Drood is gentle and gentlemanly, while Nutting is an imperious, butch diva. Similarly, Drood’s fiancée Rosa Bud is properly demure in the Dickens story, while Miss Deirdre Peregrine — a multitalented Jessie Austrian — is playfully slutty when soliciting gentlemen in the audience.

The villain of the piece is Drood’s uncle, John Jasper (Michael Hance), the music teacher of Rosa Bud who lusts after her. But when a bloody overcoat that had been worn by Drood is found after a dark and stormy night, suspicion first falls on young Neville Landless (Mauro Hantman), a penniless orphan just arrived from Ceylon with his sister Helena (Phyllis Kay), whose accent entertainingly wanders from Brighton toward Bangkok. They are solicitously taken in hand by the Reverend Mr. Crisparkle (William Damkoehler).

Characters here mainly for comic relief are abundant. Timothy Crowe gives lightly rounded dimension to drunken church sexton Durdles, who eventually declares, when under suspicion: "I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than give Drood a frontal lobotomy." Stephen Thorne plays his gap-toothed assistant, known only as Deputy, with childish pleasure when in the limelight.

But credit as the recurring delight of the evening has to go to Anne Scurria as Princess Puffer, the opium-den mother to John "Boo-Hiss" Jasper and other London denizens. From the low-key hilarity of her singing "Wages of Sin" ("Crime doesn’t pay . . . / If it did, would I be ’ere?") to eventual brief tearfulness that likely shouldn’t touch us in a melodrama, we’re watching an actor at the top of her game. Some of the songs are more or less filler, but most satisfy in antic music hall tradition. "Both Sides of the Coin" is not only sung patter-song fast by the Chairman and Jasper, but at the same time they avoid tying themselves in a knot as they each put on an overcoat while the other one is still wearing it. Classic physical yuks.

Don’t ask about the second act. Suffice to say that this is a puzzle whose pieces can be arranged in numerous plausible ways, with motives to kill Drood ranging from imperative to convenient. (All the suspects have a clever confession song prepared.)

But the real payoff here is the party you’re attending. Audience interaction and emotional involvement has been the Holy Grail of theater from the time masks were muffling shouting Greeks. Trinity Rep shows that the mystery in Edwin Drood is just a McGuffin. Our chiming in is the real fun. We audience members also get to vote on who the overly bearded detective calling himself Dick Datchery truly is, and on which two characters should get together romantically for a happy ending. Be honest: wouldn’t you love to convince Medea to quit whining and get a life?