Jekyll & Hyde, Shubert Theatre. As a kid I used to love movies like Horror of Dracula and The Pit and the Pendulum: with their lurid sexuality, garish violence, hokey plots, cliched characters, tacky faux-Victorian design, and hilariously hammy acting, these Hammer and American-International releases were campy fun at one or two bucks a pop. But I can’t understand anyone forking over $29.50 to $62 for Leslie Bricusse and Frank Wildhorn’s schlock opera Jekyll & Hyde, a cheesy combo of Hammer horror and Andrew Lloyd Webber bombast that borrows from Sweeney Todd as well as several film versions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella. (Stevenson’s own artistry is little in evidence.) Here the evil Hyde sets out to avenge his wimpy alter ego Jekyll by murdering the governors of a hospital that denied Jekyll a research grant. (Not that he needs the money: his Frankenstein-scale lab is a bilevel job any mad scientist would kill for.) Giving Hyde a motive undercuts the story’s moral imperative and minimizes our concern for the show’s endangered heroines.
