Playwright: music by Frank Wildhorn,
book and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse,
based on the story by
Robert Louis Stevenson
At: Bohemian Theatre Company at
Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W. Belmont
Phone: 773-327-5252; $20-$27
Runs through: July 20
Some say it started with Sweeney Todd in 1979, when Stephen Sondheim demonstrated that you could write songs in Weimar Republic-scale; dress your actors in Red Shield rags and Edward Gorey make-up; tell your audience what a pack of hypocritical bastards they are; and make millions doing so. Small wonder that in 1990, Steve Cuden and Frank Wildhorn were inspired to initiate a project similar to this coup. Similar, in fact, to several other coups in the history of the American Musical Theatre, by the time it premiered with Leslie Bricusse's book and lyrics in 1997. Hey, if you're gonna encore un coup, why not go all the way?
So playgoers experiencing déjà vu during the course of Jekyll & Hyde may reassure themselves that it's not their imagination. The score for the first act mostly steers clear of quasi-Sondheim syncopations and dissonances, but embraces them enthusiastically in the second. It also includes an obligatory mission-statement soliloquy for its hero, a surplus of pensive ballads for its two sopranos, a sleazy tavern scene featuring conspicuously healthy chorines doing a chair-and-derby act ( yes, just like Sally Bowles in Cabaret ) , and mobs of angry London lowlifes in heavy eyeliner crowding into our faces.
Wildhorn's melodies, both sweet and stirring, are serviceable enough, but what liberates this pastiche from derivative parody is the care, industry and sheer adrenaline expended by director Stephen M. Genovese and the Bohemian Theatre Ensemble toward retaining the grim social criticism intended by Robert Louis Stevenson, its original author. Leading the charge is Courtney Crouse, playing both the gentle Dr. Jekyll and the bestial Mr. Hyde—portrayals requiring him at times to switch personalities in four-measure increments, his transformations executed with only the assistance of a change in lighting, body stance and vocal register.
Laura McClain and Monica Szaflik have their moments as Victorian literature's familiar Good Girl and Bad Girl, while John B. Leen's fine—and in non-equity theater, rare—baritone lends gravity to his role as Jekyll's friend and counselor. The most creative elements in the show, however, are Michelle Julazadeh's costumes, which convert their wearers from righteous well-born citizens to slum-dwelling predators—the latter writhing in a literal snake pit—with such ease and efficiency that we are hardly aware of the metamorphosis. And that's the whole point.