Actor Chuck Wagner revisits`Jekyll & Hyde'
By EVERETT EVANS
Copyright 2000 Houston Chronicle
Chuck Wagner has the title roles in Jekyll & Hyde.
It's old home week for Chuck Wagner. The actor is back in Houston and back in the title roles of Jekyll & Hyde with the musical's current tour, playing through Sunday at Jones Hall.
Wagner originated the role of the good doctor turned evil twin when Frank Wildhorn and Leslie Bricusse's musical premiered at the Alley Theatre in 1990. He had gone on to other assignments by the time the show returned for two subsequent pre-Broadway engagements here in 1995 and 1996.
Robert Cuciolli, who played the roles in those tryouts, got to open the much-rewritten show when it finally reached Broadway in 1997. Despite mostly poor reviews from New York critics, it continues at the Plymouth Theater.
When it came time to launch a tour of the Broadway version, the producers contacted Wagner.
"They invited me back," he said. Houston is Wagner's last stop in the tour, which concludes here after a year and three weeks.
"It's incredible timing to close our tour here now," Wagner said, "because it's almost exactly 10 years since its premiere at the Alley."
After doing a second Wildhorn musical, Svengali, in its 1991 world premiere at the Alley, Wagner moved his family from California to New York.
"I was ready," Wagner said. "We all thought Jekyll & Hyde was, too."
But J&H's initial plans for Broadway fell through, and while the show was waiting in the wings, Wagner went on to other things -- Marius in the national tour of Les Miserables, then Javert in the Broadway production.
After that, he became standby for the Beast and Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, for both its Houston tryout and its opening on Broadway. He stayed with B&B for five years, including two years as the Beast in Toronto.
All the while, Wagner watched J&H's path to Broadway.
"As Robin Phillips directed it for Broadway, the show began to take everything so seriously. To a degree, it may have needed the different approach for Broadway. But part of the show's delight, as originally done, is that even when Hyde is a monster, he's kind of fun.
"I think this version (the current tour) is the best because it's sort of a composite of all that has gone before."
This tour retains the Broadway production's take on the final Confrontation between Jekyll and his alter ego.
"In the original, I sang one half of the duet to a huge projection of Hyde," Wagner said. "But now I'm doing the Broadway version, known as the Hair Ballet."
As now staged, the actor sings both parts of this duet alternately, flinging his head back and forth so that the rearrangement of his hair indicates whether he's the orderly Jekyll or the wild Hyde.
"I call it schizophrenic primal-scream therapy."
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