In the 1980s, Rupert Holmes, best known as a pop songwriter, took an unfinished 1860s novel by Charles Dickens and turned it into a Broadway musical that the audience had to finish. (Talk about passing the buck.) Now, The Mystery of Edwin Drood – the musical – is back in its first Broadway revival, a Roundabout Theatre production directed by Scott Ellis.

New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood talks about how this Mystery, which flouts theater convention in more ways than one, pays tribute to the long-gone English music hall tradition, and asks its audience to vote for an ending — without using a cell phone.