INDIANAPOLIS (Wed. Nov. 17, 1999) -- There's a great caterwauling going on at the Murat Theatre this week, and it's called Jekyll & Hyde, The Musical. Frank Wildhorn's pop opera -- and that's the only way to describe it -- opened Tuesday night on the Indianapolis Broadway Series and plays seven more performances through Sunday.

And the louder the singing, the more the audience applauds.

Wildhorn -- who conceived the musical when he was still a student at the University of Southern California -- takes Robert Louis Stevenson's horror classic about a scientist who transforms himself into a madman in an experiment gone wrong and turns it into a black-and-white musical with occasional drenchings of blood red.

The scenery is more impressive than the story, which tends to be boring between outbursts of song. Not until Chuck Wagner, as the driven scientist, Dr. Henry Jekyll, turns himself into Edward Hyde, the beast hiding inside all of us, does the musical take off.
And that's more than an hour into the first act.

But you'll want to see the magic that can be worked with scenic designer James Noone's stenciled scrims and a curtain that telescopes down to a peephole. The sleekly sliding scenery can turn a bleak London street into a mirrored, beakered laboratory with the twist of a black panel.

Wagner is a big man with a big voice, who can also be tender and quiet. His is the performance to watch -- controlled as Dr. Jekyll, with his hair tied back in a pony tail, which he shakes loose to become the growling Edward Hyde.

Subtle this musical is not. Anne Curtis's Tony-nominated costumes are all high hats and bustles, including a fur coat for the beastly Hyde. The scene in the Red Rat bordello, where we first meet the prostitute, Lucy, comes right out of the Kit Kat Klub in Cabaret. Sharon Brown sings Lucy with a high dramatic twist (and an almost unintelligible cockney accent), while Andrea Rivette's Emma Carew (Dr. Jekyll's fiancee) is pure, blonde and ghostly white.

These are the three stars of the show, although there are fine voices in the supporting roles, and the highly stylized ensemble can be everything from Victorian upper class hypocrites to newsboys touting tabloids filled with tales of Hyde's grisly murders.
There's humor in the put-downs of high society, and a certain bawdiness in the bordello scenes.

Wagner's best songs are This is the Moment, when he finally decides to undertake his experiment, and Alive, when he first experiences Edward Hyde in his blood.

It's an expression of the idea that without the "evil" inside us, we'd never do anything. "I feel alive. Where does this feeling of power derive?" The show won't win any honors for rhyming, but there's a structure to the music that fits the structured scenery. And if some of the songs seem to go on forever, well, it's the price you pay to get to the point where evil confronts good inside the body of one man.