Run and Hyde

It took years of out-of-town tryouts before Frank Wildhorn and Leslie Bricusse’s pop-musical version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde finally hit Broadway. Never quite a smash there, it was at least nudged into profitability by a loyal audience of musical theater fans, Ren Fest folks and everyone who signed petitions to keep Ron Perlman’s Beauty and the Beast on TV 20 years back. I’d personally find the musical’s success more heartening if, at the end of those years, it hadn’t wound up starring Sebastian Bach and David Hasselhoff. Or if the score didn’t sound so cobbled together from other sources.

Now at Just Off Broadway Theatre in a production by Shine Shows and Thin Air Theatrics, Jekyll & Hyde: The Musical is all Frankenstein in its technique: Stitch together rotting flesh and hope against hope for life. The writers have taken the bones of Stevenson’s novel, the air of doomed romance from Phantom of the Opera, the macabre violence of Sweeney Todd and some psychological wankery about man’s dual nature straight from a Batman comic. And the score comes from everywhere: Andrew Lloyd Webber-style narrative prog, cheesy goth, more power ballads than an all-’80s weekend on KUDL. Snatches of older, better songs are constantly bubbling up: “I Know Him So Well” from Chess (“In His Eyes”), Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen” (“A New Life”), chunks of Evita and Les Miserables.

That said, with so many talented people, assembled by Daniel Doss and Sarah Mae McElroy, dedicated to pulling this off, and with such an appreciative audience crowded into Just Off Broadway, I tried to give it a chance. Thanks to stirring, well-sung performances from Patrick Lewallen (as Jekyll and Hyde) and Mandy Mook (as the doomed prostitute Lucy), and also the enthusiasm of the sizable ensemble, I managed to keep myself from serious eye rolling for almost 90 minutes.

Lewellan’s visceral take on the Hyde persona, all growls and spitting with a dash of Tom Waits, demonstrates a canny sense of just how far over the top the part should be played. Mook, with a strong yet sometimes appealingly girlish voice and an insouciant curl at the corner of her smile, brings a richness of characterization to Lucy that is almost enough to save the show. First, Lucy is a sexy brat, than a neorealist street girl, then a musical theater dreamer and finally a tragic heroine. Given too few scenes to work with, Mook somehow connects all this, making Lucy’s the one intelligible arc in the show.

And here’s loud and proud applause for Andrea Boswell-Burns and Kelly Newsome McNichols, who find glory in an extended bordello sequence. And Erin Taylor and Christina Burton, effectively creepy as demonic spirits crawling around the set like it’s the cover of Houses of the Holy.

Still, as Lewellan’s preening Jekyll brewed up the potion that transforms him into Mr. Hyde, the embodiment of his darkest urges, I found myself forced to forgive more and more. Played by the talented Daniel Doss on a Sinfonia keyboard, the score sounds rubbery and fake. Somehow, I accepted that Victorian Jekyll was dressed as though he was in Reservoir Dogs; I even soldiered through wretched couplets such as The Bishop speaks for all of us/When he says you’re playing God/There’s such a thing as ethics/Over which you ride roughshod. It was harder to shrug off set trappings such as the lectern that was actually a music stand with a sweater duct-taped to it, or the fact that nonprincipal cast members kept standing directly in front of me and blocking the action.

But just after intermission came “Murder,” a lengthy number detailing, well, a string of murders. Unlike most of the tunes that precede it, which are bland and derivative but not unlistenable, “Murder” is a stabbing assault on the ears: Murder! Murder! Tum-tee-tum-tum! Murder! Murder! Tum-tee-TUM-tum! Honest to God, if you tasked half a dozen 5-year-olds with writing a song called “Murder,” half would come up with this. The other half would come up with something better.

As “Murder” shrieked on, I suffered the only real scare I’d ever had at a horror-themed play of any variety: the knowledge that there remained at least an hour to go.