Titanic Jekyll & Hyde Play On!
Wren, Celia
'Titanic,' 'Jekyll & Hyde' & 'Play On!' Celia Wren THE BROADWAY MUSICAL theater. Not that the two genres have ever been completely separate: Even the loopy French avant-gardist Antonin Artaud,...
...The production points a big ironic arrow at passengers and crew not because they are unusual or complex, but because they are play-ing cards or falling in love as if they had their whole life ahead of them, and they're on the Titanic...
...Isador Straus (Larry Keith and Alma Cuervo), last seen drinking champagne on the upper deck...
...and Mrs...
...A set that seems in constant motion-scrims, scaffolding, smoke, a vial-infested laboratory that slides for-ward, an intermittent backdrop of the brooding Thames-intensifies the phan-tasmagoric atmosphere...
...Titanic offers paint-by-numbers conflicts to pass time until the ship sinks...
...In fact, a veneer of philosophy pro-vides excellent camouflage for the kind of voyeuristic thrills these two produc-tions supply...
...Other mammoth themes-the war between good and evil, the rivalry between the public and the private self, the conflict between end and means-get thrust forward just as blatantly...
...Jekyll & Hyde, an operatic version of the Robert Louis Stevenson novella, drapes a lurid Victorian London behind its hero/villain, an arrogant scientist with the morals of Raskolnikov and the creepy sex appeal of a rock star...
...Stevenson's story, vague about the struggle for Jekyll's soul, invites us to see his strife within ourselves...
...It seems appropriate, therefore, that two of the musicals en-tering with the most advance publicity have toyed with the theme of hubris...
...What critics of Broadway extrava-ganzas condemn is the tendency of producers and theater-goers to rate tech-nology and "production values" more highly than the thought or vision that the play expresses...
...While Titanic fights for breath-ing space on the Great has already won the first few rounds...
...Titanic- yes, a musical about the maritime dis-aster-also emphasizes human ambition: Characters who rashly praise the ship as "a poem and the perfection of physical engineering" learn to their cost that they were wrong...
...The tragedy we spy on is sin-gularly unmoving: We look at it, but can-not get involved...
...What makes you think you have the right to play God...
...and pseudoprofundity...
...had no pretentions and much cheerfulness-no wonder it closed...
...Scuttling through the shadows, a chorus of the rag-clad, down-trodden poor sings, over and over, that "it's all a facade," as though we were too stupid to understand the hypocrisy of Victorian morals...
...And the Titanic's designer asks its captain the same question when it's time to allot the lifeboats...
...But it is impossible to care how these social disparities affect the play's un-derdeveloped characters, like the star-ry-eyed Irish emigrants who fall in love in third class, or the cuddly Mr...
...Certainly the ballad-heavy score, which is frequently stir-ring, matches the mood of hysterical gothicism...
...Both musicals push issues to the front, perhaps partly to deflect a certain type of reproach...
...Jekyll's un-ethical medical experiments...
...This mechani-cal wizardry permits one interesting moment, when the ship's morose, bald-headed designer, Thomas Andrews (Michael Cerveris), doomed but sud-denly inspired, starts sketching other projects as a grand piano crashes down on him...
...Jekyll & Hyde did not win any...
...A tilting set, however, is no substitute for engaging dialogue, interesting char-acters, and memorable music, all of which are in shorter supply here than lifeboats...
...The effect is striking, but it narrows the focus to a single man with sensational problems rather than suggesting the world...
...book by Cheryl L. West), which set Shake-speare's Twelfth Night in 1940s' Harlem, and let its characters express themselves through old favorites by Duke Ellington...
...Obviously the musical's creators have hit upon the right mixture of music, vi-olence (serial killing, sexual torture, a bishop who is burned alive, etc...
...Six weeks saw the opening of eight musicals, including The Life, a portrait of prostitution in Times Square in the 1980s...
...The congestion led the entertainment weekly Variety to speculate darkly on the economic viability of "Broadway's crowded waters...
...An early casualty of Broadway's mu-sical melee was the ebullient Play On...
...This heavy-handed candor deprives us of the opportunity to think through the issues ourselves...
...When musicals can pontificate about human misfortune, why should they bother to sing and dance...
...But Bricusse's real innovation is to splice every fragment of possible subtext right into the lyrics...
...Not that the two genres have ever been completely separate: Even the loopy French avant-gardist Antonin Artaud, whose idea of spectacle ran to "cries, groans, apparitions..., hierogly-phic characters, ritual costumes, man-ikins ten feet high representing the beard of King Lear," was on to some-thing when he observed, in the 1930s, that spectacle was integral to the the-ater's magic...
...Though some scenes had a forced qual-ity, and the connecting story was a threadbare excuse for the songs, the personalities-like the stately composer Duke (Carl Anderson), or the skittish femme fatale Lady Liv (Tonya Pinkins)- were more distinct, more human, and vastly more appealing than anyone tread-ing the boards of Titanic or haunting Jekyll & Hyde...
...Lobbing a few con-cepts across the orchestra pit, in the In a burst of optimism before the Tony Awards deadline, Broadway sprang forward with a song on its lips and pride in its heart...
...To experience the frisson without splurging on a ticket, one might simply enter the Lunt-Fon-tanne Theatre's box office: The names of the Titanic passengers have been in-scribed on the walls, annotated with as-terisks, to show who died...
...Steel Pier, about a dance marathon in the 1930s...
...and a revival of Candide, Leonard Bernstein's scored version of the Voltaire story...
...When a chantey sung by the stoker (Brian d'Arcy James) in the gloomy boiler room introduces the Astors and friends din-ing in the first class saloon, we under-stand the absurdity of class...
...Titanic succeeded in garner-ing five Tony Awards...
...When the formidable Char-lotte Cardoza (Becky Ann Baker), dressed in hot pink spangles, invades the men's smoking room and demands admittance to their card game, we realize that the old world order is giving way to the new...
...an irate hospital trustee protests, reining in one of Dr...
...Even the scenic design-a color-saturated Art Deco cityscape-had a consistency and logic the other pro-ductions lack...
...The mu-sical puts the contest center stage: At the evening's climax, Cuccioli repeatedly shifts back and forth from Jekyll to Hyde in a split second, altering his posture (up-right for Jekyll, stooping for Hyde), his voice (higher for Jekyll, lower for Hyde), and even his hair (slicked back for Jekyll, unruly for Hyde), synchronous with a pulsing spotlight...
...The set's different levels, rep-resenting the various parts of the ship, cant ever more steeply as the vessel is sucked into the depths...
...After intermission, irony darkens to the titillating horror of a '70s' disaster movie...
...With no need to in-terpret the production, and thus to par-ticipate in it, spectators are reduced to voyeurs...
...Interestingly, both plays contain variants on a single line...
...Through out-of-town pro-ductions and two advance recordings, this feverish melodrama, with music by Frank Wildhorn and book and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, has acquired a cult fol-lowing and a national fan club...
...Whereas Stevenson's story kept an eerie silence on the subject of Edward Hyde's specific misdeeds, the musical is explicit to the point of absurdity, giving Jekyll/Hyde (the swashbuckling Robert Cuccioli) two love interests-one madon-na, one whore (Christiane Noll and Linda Eder, both possessed of angelic voic-es)-and following him zealously as he stalks victims through the gloom-shroud-ed streets...
...Ever since the onslaught of Andrew Lloyd Webber extravaganzas, with their take-no-prisoners special-ef-fects, critics have accused Broadway musicals of being more spectacle than manner of Titanic and Jekyll & Hyde, staves off such censure, while allowing the audience members to flatter them-selves they have procured a little in-struction with their entertainment...
Vol. 124 • June 1997 • No. 12
