Jekyll and Hyde - The Musical

Artist page

Explore The Music of Jekyll and Hyde

Jekyll and Hyde follows a brilliant physician who believes the evil in human nature can be isolated and destroyed, and who decides to test the theory on himself. The formula works. What it releases is Edward Hyde, a second self with no conscience and an appetite the doctor cannot call back. Henry Jekyll's research is refused by the governors who fund his hospital, so he abandons their permission and experiments alone. As Hyde begins moving through the streets at night, two women are drawn into the doctor's double life: Emma Carew, the fiancee who trusts him, and Lucy Harris, a singer who meets the man he becomes. Each transformation costs Jekyll more of the ground he stands on. The musical takes its story from Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Frank Wildhorn and Steve Cuden conceived the stage version, Wildhorn wrote the music and Leslie Bricusse the book, with lyrics by Bricusse, Wildhorn and Cuden. A concept recording appeared in 1990, the same year the show received its first full staging, and it has been revived and toured steadily since. The score is written for big voices and sung almost throughout, moving between drawing-room propriety and the noise of the street. Numbers such as Facade, This Is the Moment, Someone Like You and Confrontation carry the argument the dialogue cannot: that the two natures were never separable, and that the respectable half had been feeding the other all along. It rewards anyone who wants gothic melodrama played straight and sung hard. The doubling is what makes it work in a theatre, because it happens live, in one body and one voice, switching between two people with nowhere to hide.