Much has happened since Dr. Henry Jekyll's last visit to South Florida in 1995.
Welcome, then, to the strange cases of Dr. Jekyll and the Messrs. Hyde.
Frank Wildhorn's musical melodrama Jekyll & Hyde -- source of the pop crossover
tunes In His Eyes, A New Life and This Is the Moment--has undergone a couple
of transformations since its departure.
The show already was much revised for its arrival on Broadway in 1997, and
has morphed again for the national tour that began in Detroit last April.
Said the trade journal Variety of this latest version, "Jekkies across the nation
will love this . retooled and also slightly rewritten production that is also
better than the Broadway staging."
Jekyll & Hyde opens Tuesday for a week at the Jackie Gleason Theater on Miami
Beach, then inaugurates the new millennium Jan. 4-16 at the Broward Center for
the Performing Arts. The company features a trio of personalities well-known
to area musical devotees, starting with Chuck Wagner in the dual role of Jekyll
and Hyde. His leading ladies are Andrea Rivette as Jekyll's fiancee, Emma, and
Sharon Brown as alter-ego Hyde's obsession, Lucy.
Wagner appeared previously on Broadway and in highly-rated tours of Les Miserables
(Broward Center, '92) and Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods (Parker Playhouse,
'89). He spent a few more years on Broadway as the beast in Disney's hit stage
version of Beauty and the Beast. More importantly for this assignment, Wagner
is the original Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of Wildhorn's adrenalized musical. Wagner
starred in the 1990 Alley Theatre premiere in Houston that was extended and
sold out the entire summer.
Does he mind that Robert Cuccioli took over the role for the first tour, and
was later nominated as best actor on Broadway?
Nope.
"The two years I was involved in Les Miserables gave me the wherewithal to
buy the house we're living in now," he says. Then came Beauty and the Beast
in Times Square, just a commute from wife Susan and their two children at home
in New Jersey. "I've been so lucky with these long-running shows, if you looked
at my tax returns, you'd think I have a real job."
He's hoping Jekyll & Hyde will be another long run -- hoping especially that
the tour will be extended beyond next spring and would eventually move into
New York.
"We have a huge support base of Jekkies online who are clamoring for it to
continue," he says. "The best of all possible worlds would be for the producers
to bring our production of Jekyll & Hyde into New York to reinvigorate the Broadway
show."
Jekkies are the show's rabid fans who keep the J&H and related Web sites bubbling.
Many of them have seen the shows dozens, in some cases hundreds, of times. Jekkies
first turned up in Houston, then multiplied along the tour and on Broadway,
where the show got assassination-quality reviews from most critics. But the
show's romantic melodrama and already-popular hit songs -- and support from
the Jekkies -- broke most Broadway conventions. The show hung on without the
usual support systems and is credited with proving that critics no longer have
the power to dictate hits and flops.
Still, there were more things Wildhorn and the show's producers wanted to change.
The new Jekyll & Hyde tour in some respects is like its pre-Broadway incarnation.
Its emphasis has been shifted away from Broadway's intimate portraits and back
to a full-bore rock musical format. Part of that is to fill theaters such as
the Broward Center, which are twice the size of Broadway's Plymouth Theatre.
Among the changes, two songs cut from the Broadway version are back in the
show, I Need to Know and Bring on the Men; the latter is a sizzling dance number
by Lucy and her hooker friends.
One thing that Wagner has welcomed from Cuccioli and Broadway director Robin
Phillips is their concept for the transformation of Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde.
It's in full view of the audience.
"When we first started doing the confrontation (in Houston) it was going to
be with Jekyll singing, and a man behind a two-way mirror and a prerecorded
voice. Then on the pre-Broadway tour, they did it with Hyde on a large projection,
and prerecorded, which was very theatrical and I think a very interesting device.
"Now, thanks to Robin (Phillips) and Bob (Cuccioli), they came up with what
I call the hair ballet," Wagner says, chuckling.
The scene caused a hullabaloo at the Broadway premiere, thrilling to some but
causing others, including most critics, to scratch their heads. In The Transformation
the actor throws his head back and stands tall to sing as Jekyll. But when Hyde's
character takes control of his body, the actor flings his head forward and the
mop of unruly hair becomes a Medusa-like frame for his scowling face. The actor
changes his voice and posture, singing both roles at the same time.
"When I first saw it myself, I said, 'They're kidding, right?' But by the time
it was over, Cuccioli was so committed to it, that you just go, 'Wow! That's
pretty interesting.' And now that I'm doing it, I've probably gotten the most
positive feedback about the confrontation scene. It's the idea of an actor alone
onstage fighting inside himself. It's a pretty clear and inspired bit of simplicity.
But it's a huge theatrical convention that you either buy or don't buy. Fortunately
for us, more people buy into it than don't."
Jekyll, Robert Louis Stevenson's most famous character, started out as a "penny
dreadful" melodrama, says Wagner, and remains that to this day. Its appeal,
he says, lies in the fact that the two characters are the same man, that Hyde
is the morally unrestrained version of Jekyll. But as Jekyll's humanitarian
experiment begins to go awry, he refuses to admit it.
"Oh, yes. Jekyll, like any addict, is in denial," Wagner says. "He says Hyde
is somebody different. But Hyde, in his evil purity, says 'No, pal! You are
me." The role is a tough grind, he says, because of the physical challenges
and the amount of time he spends onstage singing Wildhorn's full-blown anthems.
But it's also cathartic. "It's schizophrenic primal therapy," he says. "I get
to work out a lot of things. There's the idyllic romantic love with the fiancee
in the song Take Me As I Am, and the absolutely obnoxious sexuality of Dangerous
Game where Hyde is all over Lucy. "I get to be about as good and bad as you
can imagine," Wagner says, chuckling again. "And I get to work out a lot of
repressed fantasy in the course of the show."
Sharon Brown portrays Lucy, the good-hearted prostitute originally played by
Wildhorn's wife, Linda Eder. Brown made her first big musical theater splash
as the narrator in the first national tour of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor
Dreamcoat, which kicked off at the Royal Poinciana and parker Playhouses in
the early '80s. Brown returned to South Florida in 1986 in the national tour
of Dreamgirls. In both cases, she won the Carbonell Award from South Florida
theater critics for her performances. Some critics have said that in Jekyll
& Hyde, Brown steals the show.
Opposite Brown is Andrea Rivette as Jekyll's fiancee, Emma Carew. Rivette grew up in Boynton Beach, where her father, Murray, still lives. Andrea appeared in community theater in the early '90s at the Lake Worth Playhouse and for the Boca Raton Theatre Guild, where she co-starred with her dad in The Fantasticks. In '91, she was the Baker's Wife in Into the Woods at Broward Community College, and in '92 appeared as Tuptim in a Royal Palm Dinner Theatre production of The King and I. Rivette moved to New York shortly after and landed a job in Broadway's Miss Saigon. She returned to South Florida as Ellen in the national tour that played the Kravis Center in '97.
If you go
Jekyll & Hyde runs Jan. 4-16 at Broward Center. More info
For information on Jekyll & Hyde and the touring cast visit:
www.jekyll- hyde.com
www.chuck wagner.com
www.andrea- rivette.com
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