I think it's fairly safe to say that without the Phantom of the Opera, there
would be no Jekyll and Hyde - The Musical.
Not only are both about a horrific character, but American composer Frank Wildhorn
wanders down the same haunted paths as Andrew Lloyd Webber. There is a charismatic
central character, an overabundance of FM-ready power ballads and a relentless
repetition of songs designed to have you leave the theatre humming.
The production at the Jube bears little relationship to Robert Louis Stevenson's
1886 novella. Stevenson wanted to probe the good and evil in us all - this version
slights the sinister ramifications of a man attempting to play God, to feature
a florid love story.
Jekyll/Hyde is a challenge to any performer and Chuck Wagner is certainly up
to it. Tall and commanding, he is a far cry from Stevenson's original, portly
50ish doctor. Wagner is a gifted actor who performs in the grand manner. He
sings in a big, hall-filling baritone. His Dr. Jekyll is a Victorian medical
adventurer, upright and with his eyes on the stars. His Hyde, simian, animal-like,
prowls the stage like some caged jungle creature. Wagner is in fine voice through
the production but his most impressive moment comes when he sings a duet with
himself, changing from one character to the other just by facing the opposite
direction and flinging his hair about - singing in Jekyll's ringing voice in
one instant and in the next with Hyde's evil croak.
Sharon Brown plays Lucy, the unfortunate showgirl-prostitute Hyde victimizes.
She is a striking performer who stalks the stage with ferocious seductiveness.
She also knows how to belt out a song, although there is a tendency toward stridency
in her upper register. Kelli O'Hara is an appealing Emma, Jekyll's confused
but spunky lady love. She has a lovely, clear soprano and the second-act duet
between the two ladies is a high point.
Jekyll/Hyde is not great musical theatre. Wildhorn's songs often seem to be
aimed more at the charts than developing characterization or plot. Song after
song comes at you with numbing sameness. Leslie Bricusse's lyrics are serviceable
but hardly soar. But David Warren's direction (some borrowed from Robin Phillips's
Broadway production) is spectacular and theatrical and the performances are
strong enough to make this an entertaining, if slight, evening.
Jekyll and Hyde runs at the Jubilee Auditorium through Sunday.
Highly, highly recommended is Jekyll & Hyde at the Jubilee Auditorium until
Sunday. Star Chuck Wagner, you're so good, how come you're not a household name?
"I'm working on it," he says. "With this big, loud voice, I do like the stage
musicals."
And what's the trick to the amazing song Confrontation, where Chuck's two characters
confront each other - one side of him as Dr. Jekyll, the other side as Hyde?
"It's Zen-like," he says. "I have to be in the moment, each character has to
listen to each other. If I do it mechanically, I'm sunk. The trick is not to
drown in spit or choke on my hair!"
Friday 11 February 2000
If the staging is Jekyll, then the songs are Hyde Cast, lighting, costumes do
battle with witless lyrics
Liz Nicholls, Journal Theatre Writer
The Edmonton Journal
File Photo / Chuck Wagner does dexterous double duty as the title characters.
Theatre Review
Jekyll & Hyde ***
American Touring Production
Directed by: David Warren
Starring: Chuck Wagner, Sharon Brown, Kelli O'Hara
Where: Jubilee Auditorium
Running: through Sunday
Tickets: TicketMaster, 451-8000
- - -
In the most striking scene in Jekyll & Hyde, a drawing room portrait flips to
become a dark rippling mirror, and an entire Victorian research laboratory arrives
onstage. It's an eerie assortment of bottles and beakers and test tubes, glowing
with mysterious crimson and emerald liquids, lit by flickering Bunsen burners.
It's a moment of pure theatrical magic, of the kind that only a deluxe director
could conceive and pull off. It says everything about Dr. Jekyll's passion for
knowledge, his intellectual curiosity and his dangerous Faustian pact to satisfy
it.
And then? And then the guy has to sing, "I must put aside the fears I feel inside"
just as if "fears I feel inside" wasn't the dumbest larding on of redundancies
since the collected works of Celine Dion, as he launches into This Is The Moment,
the most anthemic of Jekyll & Hyde's BHS (Big Hit Songs) catalogue.
Thud. Chuck Wagner has a fine baritone voice and a stage presence for days.
But better he should never open his mouth at the moment Jekyll will become Hyde
than have to sing about the moment when "all the dreaming, scheming, and screaming
become one," or (possibly worse) the moment "when the momentum and the moment
are in rhyme."
That you get any hallucinogenic buzz at all from this 19th-century psychedelia
is a tribute both to its expert stagecraft (borrowed by director David Warren
from Robin Phillips' Broadway production) and Wagner's give 'er intensity. Ah,
and the nightmare idea, culled holus-bolus from Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886
novella, that evil is imprisoned within each of us, straining at the bars, and
day-passes are dangerous, so just say no to drugs.
But that's what Jekyll & Hyde is like, especially in this handsome touring production
that lacks the dramatic focus and style of its New York progenitor. Frank Wildhorn's
off-the-rack pop music, and Leslie Bricusse's book and often witless lyrics
constantly put those kinds of unreasonable demands on actors (and director).
The cast, led by the commanding figure of Wagner, has to work very hard to make
you understand the characterizations onstage. Not, I hasten to add, because
the combination of pop ballads and a Dickensian landscape of misty riverscapes,
grubby bars, eerie streets and fake English accents is doomed to failure by
definition: fans of Les Miz and Phantom of the Opera, not to mention Oliver!,
would rise up as one to say nay.
Come back, Andrew Lloyd Webber, all is forgiven; you're Verdi compared to Wildhorn.
Instead of songs advancing action or offering insights into character, these
numbers either repeat motives shorthand (I Need To Know) or smother individuality
in a blanket of contemporary K-lite standards. Lucy the prostitute (Sharon Brown)
becomes Everywoman-in-love, and so does Jekyll's high-class fiancee Emma (Kelli
O'Hara); they sing In His Eyes as a duet. It's entertaining in the way that
a costume party is fun when Joan of Arc and Nell Gwynn sing I Am Woman, Hear
Me Roar together, and everyone goes home in the wrong coats. The effect is more
like high camp than high drama.
Witness a scene in which the prostitutes at the brothel by the Thames do a Weimar-esque
number, Bring On The Men, straight out of Cabaret. It's not in the Broadway
production, and you can see why.
What does work is that Hyde is way sexier and more charismatic than the prim,
rather bland Dr. Jekyll in Wagner's dexterous double-performance, even if they
sing much the same kind of songs. Partly, of course, it's because the murderous
Mr. Hyde, apparently something of a social visionary, tends to snuff snotty
upper-class hypocrites who deserve it.
But give Wagner credit: his virtuoso transformation scene, in which Jekyll and
Hyde sing a duet and wrestle for the upper hand (so to speak) on a bare stage
is genuinely compelling.
And there are other scenes, too, where staging inspirations bring a subtlety
or force they wouldn't otherwise have. Like when Lucy sings her big finale on
a brass bed that is the sole object onstage against a night backdrop of the
Thames twinkling with lights. It's an image of the vulnerability that Brown,
for all her dazzling smile and major, if hard-edged, pipes, doesn't quite convey
in performance. Or the capper to a number of reprises about the social "facade"
that echoes man's inner duality, is a moment in which the chorus emerges from
the shadows of a black-and-white line projection of St. Paul's Cathedral.
The stunning red lacquered Japanese-style box in which Phillips arranged the
action in his New York production (which he designed) is gone, due, no doubt,
to the demands of larger stages on tour. But the visuals (including Ann Curtis's
costumes and Beverly Emmons' lighting) are striking nonetheless, and fun to
watch.
And even if the songs are Tickyll and Slide, you do get to hear them sung by
people who know how to sing.