Constantine Maroulis and Deborah Cox as Lucy in Jekyll & Hyde. Picture: Chris Bennion
Broadway has scored the second musical casualty of the spring season. The very noisy revival of Jekyll & Hyde at the Marquis Theatre will go silent on May 12.
The production had toured extensively before opening on Broadway on April 18 for a limited run originally scheduled to wind up June 30. The premature departure is hardly a shocker, racking up another flop for the amazingly resilient composer Frank Wildhorn. The show was pretty much despised by critics and was totally ignored in the recently announced Tony Award nominations.
The Jekyll & Hyde closing comes on the heels of the abrupt closure of the more lamented Hands On a Hard Body, which, despite its failure to find sufficient audience, garnered three Tony nominations.
Ron Cohen
Our new York correspondent Ron Cohen wrote about Jekyll & Hyde: “Boo! Composer and occasional lyricist Frank Wildhorn, Broadway’s favourite whipping boy, has just landed another musical on Broadway. This one’s a horror story and a revival as well – Jekyll & Hyde – and of course, it has given uppity New York reviewers another opportunity to express their horror at having to sit through a Wildhorn show.
And it’s true that when the music swells, as it often does, to deafening levels, it becomes something close to torture. Nevertheless, the pop-opera score has a few fetching melodies and its signature song, ‘This is the Moment’, has over the years taken on a life of its own. Furthermore, of the long string of Broadway flops racked up by Wildhorn, the first mounting of Jekyll & Hyde, back in 1997, was his most successful. It was profitless, but it did rack up some 1,500 performances and developed an obstreperous cult of admirers known as Jekkies. Whether this revival will attract a new generation of Jekkies remains questionable. Under Jeff Calhoun’s busy but uninspired direction of Leslie Bricusse‘s perfunctory book, the show makes Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale of good and evil clashing within one person more wearing than either scary or sexy.”
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