Constantine Maroulis and Deborah Cox in Jekyll & Hyde. Picture: Chris Bennion
Opened April 18, at the Marquis Theatre, New York, for an open-ended run.
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.
The title characters are played by Constantine Maroulis, who attracted a fan base as a finalist on TV’s American Idol. He then went on to receive a Tony Award nomination for his work in Rock of Ages, another extremely noisy but cheerier musical. Maroulis’ Jekyll is an unprepossessing, bespectacled fellow with a neat ponytail, but when an injection of mysterious and brightly coloured chemicals cooked up in mammoth test tubes transforms him into Hyde, the eyeglasses disappear, his hair explodes into a limp mess and his diction sounds borrowed from Johnny Depp’s Sweeney Todd, as he goes out to bludgeon various denizens of Victorian London. Neither characterisation is particularly gripping, but whether he’s Hyde or Jekyll, Maroulis sings with volcanic force.
The same is true of Deborah Cox, a popular disco/rhythm and blues recording artist from Canada, portraying the comely prostitute-cabaret girl, who attracts the attention of both the good and evil sides of our hero. The soprano of Teal Wicks as Jekyll’s genteel fiancee is a bit more subdued, but she has her fortissimo moments as well. No matter how softly or sweetly the numbers in this show may start, it’s a pretty safe bet they’ll be threatening to pulverise the walls of the theatre by the finish. And to double the ante, in the climactic scene when Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde battle each other for supremacy of their shared body, Maroulis gets to sing against a pre-recorded gigantic video of himself.
All this superhuman vocalising in Jekyll & Hyde had some folks in the audience whooping it up with enthusiasm, but you can’t help wondering how these talented performers are going to make it through the routine of eight performances a week. I just sat there doing nothing but listening and could hardly make it through one.
Ron Cohen
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