Jekyll and Hyde @ The King's Theatre

Admittedly one meets any production peddling a nostalgic celebrity heart-throb as the lead with an exaggerated degree of scepticism, but let’s say there’s more than one side to this musicalised production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Ambassador Theatre Group get a lot right with this one, but leave a number of areas for improvement.

Unforgivably (for a professional singer no less) Marti Pellow has poor diction when he’s speaking. He’s a little inanimate as Jekyll as his hands are rigidly glued to his sides, but he suddenly springs to life fiendishly as Hyde whom he masters with suitable raw malice and gusto. With alluring wizardry Pellow pours a green potion from one beaker into another where it instantly turns red and upon drinking the concoction begins his transform to bombastically mendacious synth strings. Cloaked in a cape with a top-hat draped over his face and his cane held aloft he is the very picture of ominous – a great success.

Other highlight performances are those of David Delve as Sir Danvers Carew, Mark McGee as John Utterson and Sabrina Carter as Lucy, a prostitute, although inexplicably she keeps dropping out of her East-End accent for no apparent reason.

The score, composed by Frank Wildhorn and orchestrated by Tom De Keyser the musical director, boasts of nothing extravagant but idiomatically creates a suitably dark environment for the action to take place. It includes some interesting unexpected key changes and all the climatic material is deftly executed to create whirlwinds of drama. The chorus numbers Façade and Murder, Murder are particular highlights.

Lyricist and librettist, Lesley Bricusse, who once upon a time wrote Goldfinger, makes himself guilty of some shamelessly cod rhymes and unnecessary expletives that strike as out of place with the setting (I note that the lasting impression left by an otherwise enjoyable satire on gossiping high society is: “bitch, bitch, bitch” only for it to transpire that is indeed the title of the song,) but on the whole the adaptation does what a book should do: tells the story. There are even some effective new elements included to those familiar with the Robert Louis Stephenson novella, such as Hyde’s sexual relationship with Jekyll’s prostitute confidante who, though she sings of her longing for the tender virtues of Jekyll absent in her street life, is in a way drawn to the alluring strength of man’s baser nature embodied in Hyde. Amusingly when speaking of him to Jekyll she quips, “You’re not like him at all.”

Earlier in the narrative Jekyll had presented his case for an experiment which had the potential to isolate the evil in man from the good to a board of Governors who each maintained a highly moral façade only later to be exposed as hypocrites. Thus when Hyde wreaked vengeance upon them for denying Jekyll his research it seemed as though they had drawn him in to them like the Jungian shadow which once confronted loses much sway, but when denied brings calamity in its wake.

The concept is expanded upon in the most climatic and effectively rendered scene where Jekyll confronts Hyde through a one-way mirror threatening to destroy him only to be told by Hyde, “I am you.” In the very denying that the dark is an inextricable part of his nature Jekyll empowers all his supressed inclinations to take hold of him and run rampant. This theme was the greatest success of the show.