As it gets closer to Halloween, I thought we’d celebrate with scary musicals! Well, maybe not scary, but at least gothic or horror inspired, if not exactly horrifying, all of which can be applied to Jekyll and Hyde at some point in its long career.
Jekyll and Hyde started out in Houston, TX at the Alley Theater, written by Frank Wildhorn, he of Whitney Houston’s “Where Do Broken Hearts Go?” fame. The show premiered first in 1990 and then again in 1995. The show toured, and was rewritten and finally opened in 1997 on Broadway, to close in 2001. The show was well received on the road, and came to Broadway with its own personal brand of die-hard fans known as “Jekkies”, which, horrifyingly enough still exist. By the time it showed on Broadway, Linda Eder had been playing Lucy, off and on for over 8 years. By this time, she had married Frank Wildhorn, and has shown up in at least the concept phase of many of his shows.
Most of us are familiar with the basic story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, even if we’ve never read the original novella. Some stuffy English guy drinks a potion and acquires a split personality where he’s alternately stuffy and British or a cold blooded murderer. There have been numerous adaptations out there, but the basic story is the same. The plot of Jekyll and Hyde differs from the novella with the addition of numerous subplots and the expansion of characters mentioned in the book. Now, Jekyll is a prominent lawyer, engaged to be married to a Miss Lisa Carew, later changed to Emma in an effort to not confuse her with Jekyll’s other love interest, the prostitute with a heart of gold, Lucy. Like most PWAHOGs, Lucy is in love with our protagonist and engages in a carnal love that doesn’t sully the virginal nature of his relationship with his fiancée.
Off-Broadway, Jekyll goes to his engagement party, where the rich guests are all gossiping behind each other’s backs, only to turn around and leave to go visit the Board of Directors of St. Jude’s Hospital. Jekyll pitches a plan to use psychiatric patients and test them with his new and untested formula that, supposedly, will extract all the evil from a person’s soul. The board asks him rude and invasive questions like “who do you plan on using for these experiments?” “What brings you to this conclusion?” and “what will do you will all that evil lying around?” Apparently, we’re supposed to see that they are short sighted and caught up in their own egos, but they ask some pretty basic questions that Jekyll doesn’t have answers to. Distraught at being rejected, Jekyll goes to visit a brothel with his friend, where he meets the whore/singer Lucy, trying to make her big break. She falls in love with the penniless writer delusional lawyer, and they form a relationship. Jekyll tests out his potion on himself and proceeds, over the course of two acts, to kill everyone, except his fiancé and best friend, who pulls the trigger to kill him.
Broadway changed the show’s running order, so that Jekyll visits the Board of Directors FIRST, which makes him late to his engagement party, which he leaves early to go visit a brothel. A real catch that one. The other big changes are replacing the more appropriate Lucy number “Bring On The Men” with the more esoteric “Good and Evil,” a number which Ms. Eder has been on record as being disastrous, and moving Lucy’s penultimate number, “No One Know Who I Am” to her opening piece. Originally, she sings it in the second act, and we’ve watched her story arch of dealing with a penniless writer delusional lawyer who doesn’t have the balls to make a decision. It ends with Hyde approaching her in one of the creepiest ways imaginable, which shockingly comes through on the concept album. As an opener, it doesn’t work, since we don’t know her enough to care if the song is sung plaintively, and certainly doesn’t work as a comedic number, as David Hasslehoff’s colleague shows us on the DVD.
Love it or hate it, Jekyll and Hyde will live on for a long time, if only in the song “This is the Moment,” which has been covered by The Moody Blues and sung at the 1994 Olympics, the 1996 Democratic Convention, the World Series, the Super Bowl and George W. Bush’s inauguration. It is currently being brought back to Broadway for a limited engagement starring Constantine Maroulis and Deborah Cox.
