Warning: This is long! 🙂 This is the review I sent my friends…lots of comparisons are made with both the Broadway production and the Complete recording. It was really like seeing an entirely new show, it was so different!
The dominating feature on stage at many times was a large outline of a face. So when we first sat down, there was a dark scrim across the stage with a large hole in the
center in the shape of a face, and a red curtain where the hole was. Anyway, as the show started, just the curtain pulled back, so all the action was still taking place inside the big face. It was in the mental hospital, and Jekyll was there with Sir Danvers, Stride and Utterson, and his father. (They didn’t have any of that annoying narration by Sir Danvers and Utterson…yay! 🙂 They talked for a bit, then everyone else left and Ethan sang
“Lost in the Darkness”. At the end, he kissed the guy, said, “Gute nacht vater”, and moved to the front of the stage and started to sing “I Need to Know”. All these people came out of the back of the stage with these masks on as he was singing…insane people? I’m not sure. Anyway, Ethan stepped through the face onto the lower part of the stage, and the curtain closed behind him, and he sang the rest of the song directly to the audience.
Immediately after this was the Board of Governors. They all entered from the doors in the
audience (there was a lot of crowd interaction, actually…it was fun! :-), and other people
were in the boxes as the “audience” for the Board. Stride introduced everyone, and then Jekyll
and Utterson came in to make his presentation. Lady Beaconsfield had a fainting fit at this
point (I’m not sure exactly why), and all of the rest of the board spent the entire song looking
after her instead of paying any attention to Jekyll. (Ethan was stamping his foot and getting
upset :-). The guy who played Stride was great…he was like a foot shorter than Ethan, and had
this smug little grin on his face as he asked the Board for their decision. The Board left and
Jekyll and Utterson did “How Can I Continue On?”. Then they both left, and the scene changed to
the slums of London.
Only the lower class sings Facade in this version. It starts off with Stride walking by the front of the stage, and people singing the song at him…he tries to argue with them, but there’s too many of them. Then the rest of the Board walk by, and the whole song is really directed at them. It makes much more sense. The Spider has much more of a presense throughout the whole show, and that was established in this song too. One of my favourite bits was this blind balloon-seller, who was walking along the front of the stage with his cane every now and then. The first time he appeared was during Facade, and Proops popped one of his balloons! The poor guy couldn’t see what was going on. It made me sad. 🙂
Then to the engagement party…pretty much the same as New York here (very different looking
set, but same idea), but when Stride comes to do “Lisa Carew”, he’s quite drunk, and is really
all over her! He follows her around (he looks like a little puppy, he’s so much shorter than she
is! :-), and she keeps pushing him away. They brought back the “Simon, enough, there’s nothing
more” bit, which I think adds so much to it. Then Jekyll arrives, running down the staircase.
Stride grabs a champagne glass from the archbishop, goes on the steps and makes his toast (“Dr.
Jekyll, may I be the first to wish you and your bride-to-be peace and prosperity”), and then he
dumps the champagne out on the steps! Ethan got a little angry. 🙂 Finally everyone toasts the
couple, and they’re left alone.
Take Me as I Am was lovely…I really liked Carina Sandhaus as Lisa. A nice touch they had was
having some of the maids in the background spying on them as Jekyll kisses her, and giggling. I
just thought it was cute. 🙂
Letting Go is the same as on Broadway, the shorter version. Then we go into the first Facade reprise. BUT IT MADE SENSE. I was so happy! There was a reason for it. Stride was walking home from the party, very drunk by now, and saw the Spider. He turned to go back the other way, but two people came out and beat him up and robbed him. I liked it. 🙂
Jekyll and Utterson arrive at the Red Ret. Nellie comes out to greet them (she has a much bigger part in this version too), and finally convinces Jekyll to go in. They sit down as a dancing bear finishes his act (actually Nellie’s son in costume :-). Then Lucy appears. Bring on the Men was a GREAT number! Some of the dancing was a little explicit though. Ethan kept turning away, embarassed. 🙂 But it was fun.
Afterwards, the Spider is pushing Lucy around, and Jekyll comes to her rescue. He offers her a
drink, and then goes to leave. She does the “It’s not every day, me friends and I has gents like
you just dropping by…” bit, and when she sings, “Before you go, you’ll know just why you came
here”, she’s standing behind him and slides her hand around his waist and down the front of his
pants. That took me by surprise. 🙂 So he grabs her hand, and gives it back to her. 🙂 He
gives her the card and some money and leaves. Then the next Facade reprise was two of the men
who were in the Red Rat, hiding their faces from the Spider as they left…again, it made sense!
Jekyll and Utterson get back to his place, and when Utterson leaves, Poole tells Jekyll that his
father has died. THAT IS HIS MOTIVATION FOR THIS IS THE MOMENT. It makes sense!! You’ll hear me
say that a lot, but I was just so happy with all the things that made sense in this production.
Anyway, Ethan did a wonderful This is the Moment. His lab is interesting. I don’t think I like
it quite as much as the Broadway set, but it’s a very neat effect.
Then the transformation. My goodness. 🙂 First of all, he draws blood, then mixes it with
something else, and drinks it. You heard a few people reacting to that. 🙂 When he starts to
feel the transformation, it’s all in his face. He tries to walk back over to the table to write
in his journal, but he keeps getting pulled in different directions. Finally he does the whole
rolling on the floor bit, but his pulling the hair out is much more subtle than the other men
I’ve seen. He must be in great shape though…he does a LOT of tumbling and stuff in this part.
🙂 So he does the “Free!” bit, walks over and writes something in the journal, then is about to
leave, but spots the formula that Jekyll used. He picks it up and throws it into the fire,
making a rather big explosion, which made me jump quite a bit the first night, and even when I
was expecting it! 🙂
Rather than going right into Alive though, the next scene is Girls of the Night. Lucy and Nellie
sing it, and then at the end, Hyde enters. He buys Lucy from the Spider, and they do the whole
“Lucy meets Hyde” bit. She puts him down (it’s actually quite funny, the look on both their
faces), and one of the other men who’s there makes fun of Hyde. Bad move. 🙂 Hyde goes over and
pulls his eye out! It was gross! 🙂 (It’s cool though, ’cause at the wedding at the end, the
guy is there with a patch over his eye! 🙂 Anyway, THEN he starts to sing Alive.
He sings the whole song (not like on Broadway, where it’s broken up), and he runs into Lucy
again. She is very attracted to him, but everytime they get close, he starts hurting her. You
actually see him inflicting the wounds that she gets Jekyll to heal.
Then back to Jekyll’s house, where they do His Work and Nothing More. They do the old version,
from the complete recording, and it sounds so nice. Lisa and Sir Danvers are down on the bottom
of the stage, while Jekyll and Utterson are up in his house. Poole has been sent out to get some
more drugs, and he returns with a note from Lucy, so Jekyll goes to her house.
I LOVED the set for Lucy’s room. It looked so much more like a prostitute’s room than the one on
Broadway does! It’s small, with peeling wallpaper, and a little bed that looks like a hospital
bed. There’s a dirty window, and the toilet in the corner behind a divider. Anyway, she’s waiting when Jekyll arrives. He tends to her wounds as she sings “Sympathy, Tenderness”, and then she kisses him. He doesn’t know what to do, so he just leaves. Then, by herself, she sings “Someone Like You”, as you see Jekyll walking away in the background.
Then we have the Archbishop returning to the Red Rat. But rather than being with a young girl, like he is on Broadway, he’s with Nellie’s son! Anyway, Hyde comes and starts beating him up, and then does an Alive reprise, as he pours gasoline on him, lights a match against the side of the building, and sets him on fire. (And the bishop is actually on fire!!!! He lifts his arm, and it’s on fire!)
Before I go too much farther, I better stop and say how much I enjoyed the cast of the show as well. Carina Sandhaus was a really good Lisa…I mean, there’s not a whole lot you can do with that role, but she did it well. And Lyn Liechty as Lucy was FABULOUS!!! I mean, she was better than Linda. Her voice was *unbelievable*, and she just seemed more like a prostitute. She was really good in the scenes with Jekyll, and even better in the ones with Hyde.
Anyway, back to the show. Act Two started with the big face in the middle of the stage again, but there was no curtain there, and the cast came out before intermission was over, and was just
mingling among themselves. Anyway, when the music started, they all ran away, and the newsboy came out to start “Murder, Murder”. He kept throwing newspapers into the crowd…I really wanted one, but no luck. 🙂 He was all over the theatre though…up in the boxes and everything, throwing newspapers down onto the crowd. It was neat. 🙂
The bishop’s funeral took place inside St. Paul’s, and everyone was kneeling down to pray, and Lord Savage and General Glossop got up and were talking, and then Hyde came up between them. It took me by surprise the first time, and even afterwards I couldn’t figure out exactly when he came on stage. But anyway, Savage kneels back down, and Hyde kills Glossop by sticking his sword through his throat. It was soooo cool…and Glossop actually turned around so you could see the sword was all the way through his throat…neat effect!
The sets are just too cool…like when Jekyll meets up with the apothecary for the drugs, the entire rest of the cast was raised on these stairs to reveal a subway below! Wow!!
They don’t have that awful umbrella dance, thank goodness, but I still think that the dancing
that’s there isn’t necessary. Same with Facade…it just doesn’t go with the show. I don’t know
why they bother. Anyway, the next killings take place outside a party, where Proops, Lady
Beaconsfield and Lord Savage are just leaving. They’re a bit drunk, and they’re standing outside
talking, and Hyde comes along, pretending to be a drunk, drinking out of a paper bag. 🙂 He goes over to them and is laughing with them, and he offers Proops a drink, and then proceeds to
shove the bottle down his throat, suffocating him. Savage quietly sneaks back inside. He then strangles Lady Beaconsfield with her pearls…same idea as Broadway. It took her a LONG time to
die though. 🙂 And while that’s going on, all the people inside the party start to realize what’s going, and by the time she’s dead, they’re all staring out. Hyde just looks at them all
and says something to the effect of “Boo!”, which was just too funny. 🙂 Anyway, the poor blind guy with his balloons happened to be going by again at this point, and Hyde went over and took
his balloons and his cane! 🙁 But, the guy found Proops’ hat and cane, so he was okay after all. 🙂
Now we go back to the subway…all the upper class people are leaving town. Lord Savage is alone
in the subway, when along comes Hyde, with the cane and a single balloon, pretending to be
blind. I thought that was so clever. 🙂 He gives Savage the balloon and pushes him in front
onto the subway tracks just as a train arrives, and this severed arm with a balloon attached
comes flying back up. Yuck. 🙂
So when that whole scene is finally done, we go back to Jekyll’s house, where Lisa is coming out of the lab, reading his journal. He finds her with it, and they fight, and she sings Once Upon a Dream, which was lovely. They left in the “When you need me, if you need me, you know where I’ll be” bit, which I think is nice. After she leaves, Jekyll starts writing in his journal again, and sings the Reflections, bringing out a gun as he talks of suicide. He’s sitting facing the audience for this song, and leans back when he sings “So wonderful is his love of life” so that he’s lying down, and then he starts doing the Hyde laugh and all you can see is his hand coming down to touch himself, but then he regains control again, and is writing in the journal when John enters. They talk about Hyde, and Jekyll convinces him that Hyde is a colleague and not to worry, and he gets up to go back to the lab. Utterson sees the gun, and asks him about it…Jekyll said it’s for protection…because of the murders. 🙂
Then we had The World Has Gone Insane. WOW. I love this song to begin with, and I was very, very curious as to how they were going to stage it. It started off with Jekyll lying almost flat on the ground, but he had these wires attached to him, and as the song progressed, he was raised up, and was then almost flying around the stage, as the walls were these flashing neon lights and images of cells and parasites and all sorts of things. It was really quite effective. I felt I was going insane. 🙂
At the end of the song he’s left hanging up at the ceiling as Lisa and Lucy come out to sing In His Eyes. This was definitely one of the highlights of the night, since both these women are so great, and at the end they actually looked at each other, which I thought was very effective. They didn’t have the other people on stage like they do in New York…it was just the two of them.
Lisa leaves, and Lucy is standing at the front of the stage. You hear this “Lucy”, and it really
sounds like Jekyll, but of course it’s Hyde (“For a moment, I thought it was someone else…”)
They do “It’s a Dangerous Game”, but they’ve gone back to the original meaning of this song,
where Lucy is really attracted to him. They’re not touching each other until the “No one speaks”
bit, at which point, he’s standing behind her to the side, and she puts his hand under his coat,
and he puts his coat over her, so they’re not really touching each other anyway. 🙂 He starts
to strangle her at the end of it, but Jekyll stops him from doing it and Lucy runs away.
Back to Jekyll’s lab, where Utterson arrives to find Hyde. The transformation back to Jekyll was
REALLY well done…Ethan must have taken gymnastics or something, ’cause he was almost doing
flips. 🙂 He gives John the letter for Lucy, and gets the chemicals and starts to work on it
again, singing “The Way Back”. At the end of it, he goes to each wall and pulls out these neon
glowing tube things and wraps them around his arms. I didn’t get that at all. 🙂
In Lucy’s room, the Spider is just leaving (buttoning his shirt), and Lucy is in the washroom when Utterson enters. She calls for him to make himself comfortable, so he sits down, and then she says to take off his clothes and she’ll be with him in a minute. He leaps back to his feet and pulls his jacket tighter…it was funny. 🙂 Anyway, he gives her the letter from Jekyll, and leaves, and she sings “A New Life”. The background opened up to show a brighter sky, which I thought was a little cheesy, but whatever. Towards the end of the song there starts to be thunder, and in one clap, the light goes off for just a second, and when it comes back on, Hyde is sitting in her window. It scared me. 🙂
She tries to leave, but he’s locked the door. He reads the letter from Jekyll and gets even more
upset, and she’s really afraid by this time. She’s shaking and almost crying. He tells her to
sit back on the bed, and he sits behind her and does the “Sympathy, Tenderness” reprise, with
her shaking all the time. Then he stabs her in the back (she’s not wearing white, btw!!), and
then he puts her head down on the bedpost and slices her throat. All you see is this blood
running down the white mattress. VERY effective. He lays her back on his lap as she’s twitching,
trying to hum “Sympathy, Tenderness”, and just before she dies, she reaches her hand up to
Hyde’s face and says “Henry.” Hyde just laughs and then calls to Jekyll, “Henry, come and see
what you’ve done.” He turns back into Jekyll and jumps up shouting “Oh my
God, what have I done??” He runs out of the room, calling Lisa’s name. I *really* liked that.
Then the Confrontation. It’s back to starting with “It’s over now, I know inside”, rather than the Lost in the Darkness reprise. The stage is tilted, which makes more sense as to why Hyde is looking down and Jekyll is looking up. Also, Hyde has a green light on him, while Jekyll’s is yellow, which accentuates the difference. Finally, Ethan just did it really well. There is such a difference between his Hyde and Jekyll voices. It also wasn’t quite a “snap” as he changed from one to the other but more as if there was really a struggle going on inside of him. I thought it was fabulous.
At the end, he goes to the door to leave, and before leaving he says, “The experiment is a success!” Then we have the last Facade reprise, and this one I thought was REALLY effective. It’s sung by all the Board of Governors and Lucy, in death masks. Very chilling.
Then we go to the wedding. It’s not the ceremony, like on Broadway, but rather after the
wedding…they’re already married. They’re about to have their pictures taken, when he starts to
feel the transformation. Utterson tries to hide him, but it’s impossible. When Stride does the
“Look at this monster, Lisa” bit, Hyde goes over to him and rips his heart out!!! (“He died of a
broken heart”, Ethan said 😉 Then he grabs Lisa, and is…how shall I put this…shoving his
pelvis into her and trying to lick her face…it was interesting. 🙂 She calls to Jekyll and
gets him to release her, and that’s when Jekyll asks Utterson to kill him. He does the whole, “I
can’t, Henry” thing, then Jekyll turns back to Hyde, and starts towards the crowd, and Utterson
shoots him. And shoots him. And shoots him. SIX TIMES. And it was soooooo cool…Ethan had his
back to the audience, and when the gun went off this bloody bullet hole appeared on his back!!!
It was so neat! I don’t know how they did it. So Lisa holds him and does the “You are free now,
you’re with me now” bit, and he dies. The End. 🙂
The Quotes:
“It’s supposed to be a heart. I know it looks like something you’d get at Burger King, but it’s a heart.”
Ethan, on what he tears out of Stride at the end of the show
The cast:
|
Dr. Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde |
ETHAN FREEMAN |
|
Lucy |
LYN LIECHTY |
|
Lisa Carew |
CARINA SANDHAUS |
|
John Utterson |
JÜRGEN WAGNER |
|
Sir Danvers Carew |
EBERHARD STORZ |
|
Nellie |
BRIGITTE OELKE |
|
Simon Stride |
OLIVER POLSTER |
|
Spider |
KARIM KHAWATMI |
|
Poole |
BURKHARD HEIM |
|
Lady Beaconsfield |
NICOLE ARLINGHAUS |
|
Bishop von Basingstoke |
MARSHALL COOPER |
|
General Lord Glossop |
PETER R. SKABA |
|
Sir Archibald Proops |
HEINER DRESEN |
|
Lord Savage |
ANTOINE GODOR |
|
Ensemble |
KIRSTY ADAMS |