Constantine Marouli, Deborah Cox (PHOTO CREDIT: CHRIS BENNION PHOTO)
This is the Moment . . . When Things Start to go Wrong
Like its namesake, this Jekyll & Hyde has a bit of split personality
by Stuart Munro
Jekyll & Hyde is one of those shows I’ve never been sure what to do with. The score is peppered with some of the most memorable songs that the 1990s added to the musical theatre canon, but Leslie Bricusse’s book and lyrics are so overwrought and Frank Wildhorn’s pop score is so repetitive that I’ve always found the material impossible to sift through and find something coherent enough to build a show out of. So imagine my surprise last night when the curtain came up on a somewhat subdued and restrained treatment of this famously over-the-top show. The opening mob-like scene has been replaced with an upstairs/downstairs look at London society and, along with what I’m sure are some new orchestrations, there is an almost restrained and chamber quality to the first two-thirds of Act I. Sure, some of the 90s pop-ishness still comes out in the score, but it’s not nearly as brash as previous incarnations of this piece have been.
Sadly, all that hard-earned subtlety comes to a crashing halt as soon as Mr. Hyde appears, and the show quickly descends into the over-the-top ridiculousness I tend to associate with it. The climactic confrontation between our two titular characters has been reduced from an intense battle of the wills to a 1980s Def Leppard music video, and the show’s finale is laden with enough heavy-handed Christian imagery sure to leave even the most pious among us confused.
