Visuals outshine musical moments
"Jekyll & Hyde" score doesn't enhance story

Friday, February 25, 2000
THEATER REVIEW

Jekyll & Hyde: The Broadway Musical

Company: Portland Opera Presents KeyBank Best of Broadway

When: Continues 7:30 p.m. through Sunday, plus 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday

Where: Civic Auditorium, 222 S.W. Clay St.

Tickets: $15-$57.50; 503-790-2787.

By HOLLY JOHNSON, special to The Oregonian

"Jekyll & Hyde," a Broadway touring production in town through Sunday, has some great visual moments, thanks to scenic designer James Noone. As Hyde the monster begins to stalk people, a shadow of him behind a scrim grows to gigantic proportions, a portent of the destruction to come.

And in an opening courtroom scene, Dr. Jekyll enters from a rectangle of red light against a black backdrop that tells us much about the story's passionate nature. Later, a gleaming laboratory with bubbling beakers reflected into a giant mirror takes your breath away. And a black-and-white image of St. Paul's Cathedral in Victorian London, where the story unfolds, offers a boundless sense of time and place.

Alas, Frank Wildhorn's music does not. Although his "Jekyll & Hyde" score has sold like hot cakes, and "Jekkies" or fans of the musical countrywide have flocked to the show because of the musical numbers, it's not because the tunes particularly enhance the story.

In fact, the songs leave little room for subtlety or character development, and there isn't a single musical reference to Victorian England. Most of the tunes don't help Robert Louis Stevenson's classical story move along, nor do many of them help bring us closer to the characters. It's just one big, gut-wrenching ballad after another.

Late 19th-century London abounds with rich stories that translate brilliantly to the theater. Look at "Oliver," "Sweeney Todd" or "The Elephant Man," with themes of brutality, social inequality and a fascination with science and medicine. Stevenson's tale of horror and intrigue, which begins when respectable Dr. Jekyll (Chuck Wagner) mistakenly turns himself into a monster called Hyde, is the stuff of high drama. Like Andrew Lloyd Webber, Wildhorn treats the story like an opera, with little spoken dialogue. Leslie Bricusse's wonderful lyrics are a saving factor, but they deserve more diverse melodies.

A lion of a man with the lion's share of the songs, Wagner truly is a star with a wonderful, enduring voice. In the second act when he sings "Confrontation" as both Jekyll and Hyde, it's a highlight: Jekyll's dilemma suddenly becomes crystalline. When Wagner tosses his mane of hair one way, he's Hyde. When he gives us a three-quarter profile in another, he's Jekyll. The popular tune "This Is the Moment" resounds with suspense and hope in Wagner's capable hands. But it's only a moment.

Sharon Brown as Lucy, the prostitute who befriends both the good doctor and his evil alter-ego, is particularly effective in such tender numbers as "Someone Like You," although her cockney accent isn't convincing. Kelli O'Hara shows just the right restraint as Jekyll's long-suffering fiance, Emma Carew. And James Clow as John Utterson, Jekyll's faithful friend, serves the story economically yet powerfully.

Many clichs shape David Warren's direction: The line of characters in the first act marching aggressively toward the audience is right out of "Les Misrables." The use of newspaper sellers bringing us the news of Hyde's killings in the London streets has been done many times.

But the final scene in the church has a freshness to it. Within the grand cathedral interior, Jekyll's friends and colleagues witness his wedding and the frightening emergence of Mr. Hyde for one last time.