It’s getting wonderfully gloomy at the Bainbridge Performing Arts playhouse this month with a production that opens this Friday night. It’s wonderful in the fact that this darkness illuminates the things which we, as a society, tend push into the shade or lock away in private blackness. And it should leave us examining what’s inside ourselves.
We all have a dark side you’ll see. It’s innate, one part of every human being is an angel and the other a devil; the course of one’s life is then determined by which side wins the battle of unbalance.
All that this two-faced monstrous mad-scientist heralded at the name Jekyll and Hyde had hoped to do was separate the two and eliminate the evil.
“The original staging was done with the idea of the whole set being smoke and mirrors … saying look into your own reflection, look into your own eyes, look into your own soul,” BPA director Steven Fogell said, noting one of the American Broadway version of Jekyll and Hyde’s very first visions and the story’s formative point. “We have to look beyond these masks that everybody wears every day.”
Fogell was a merchandising member of the team that produced “Jekyll and Hyde” at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in the mid-‘90s in Seattle, working then with the man behind the musical theater masterpiece — Frank Wildhorn — before the show hit Broadway. Now, he’s directing a very talented team undertaking the enchantingly gruesome musical at BPA. Their show opens at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the 200 Madison Ave. Playhouse on Bainbridge Island. There will be a pay-what-you-can preview Thursday, also at 7:30 p.m.
And for this Jekyll rendition’s staging, Fogell and the crew have decided to keep the smoke and mirrors and virtually all else at bay, making the stage into somewhat of a warehouse room hollowed out to allow for thought.
“We’re trying to defocus on the set and do more with the lighting so you are not taken away by all of these fake walls and buildings,” Fogell said. “But (the actors) are more in these open areas with all this dramatic lighting so that you can really fall into listening.”
This is the type of musical in which the story is literally told through it’s lyrics, he added.
It’s a tale, first penned by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson and published in 1886, about a lawyer’s investigations into some strange occurrences between his old friend Dr. Henry Jekyll and a blatantly malevolent man, Mr. Hyde.
Dr. Jekyll, a member of high society old-London, opens the play with a speech surmising, “In each of us there are two natures … It is the curse of mankind that these polar twins should be constantly struggling.”
The doctor is transfixed on developing a chemical concoction that will house each twin in a separate entity therefore relieving life of all that is unbearable. But when the board of scientists rejects his wishes to test his hypothesis on others, Jekyll injects himself and invokes a lethal case of schizophrenia.
If you ask me, I think Dr. Jekyll was a split personality just waiting to happen due to the fact that he’s stringing along two opposite women – the superior class Emma Carew (Michelle Lorenz Odell) and the prostitute Lucy Harris (played by Jessica Low).
“Jekyll and Hyde” is one of the darker throes for the BPA stage, rated PG-13, with its intimate violence and provocative subculture, but it’s nothing worse than you’d see on television, Fogell said. And it’s being performed by top-of-the-line vocalist thespians with arguably one of the most beautifully sinister scores ever-written.
“You’re watching this story that has so much
to do with violence and tragedy, but it’s music is
so beautiful … it’s like your mind can’t quite process what you are seeing,” Fogell said.
“You’re hearing this beautiful ballad from the orchestra while at the same time you’re seeing a hideous murder.
“A lot of it is left up to your imagination,” in terms of actual visual violence, he said, but nearly the entire show is drenched in carnage — six murders in the two-hour play.
The show’s dark nature is akin to BPA’s staging of “Cabaret,” directed by Fogell last year, which is a story about a gang of prostitutes forced to entertain nazi servicemen during the time of and before World War II.
“At first it was one of those gambles … that people are either going to love this or freak out because it’s too over the top,” Fogell said. “And people loved it.”
Audiences loved it because it was real, he surmises, and it respected their maturity levels enough to know they could handle the uglier side of life.
“Not everything has to be squeaky clean or a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical,” said Fogell, also BPA’s newest artistic director. “My goal is just to balance out the year, try to ensure that there is something for everybody … I love when people leave the theater that they leave wanting to talk about it, that it riles them, that they are moved.”
To see the Bainbridge theater’s entire theatrical season lineup visit www.bainbridgeperformingarts.org or call (206) 842-4560.
