THEATER REVIEW : Dr. ‘Jekyll’s’ Mixed Formula : Hit Songs and Vocal Pyrotechnics Can’t Hide Lack of Characters

First there was the recording. Out of the recording came hit singles, including “This Is the Moment,” a favorite of Olympic ice skaters and hyperventilating lounge singers.

But “Jekyll and Hyde” was determined to be a cast album with an actual cast. The show’s journey to the stage has been rocky, starting with a 1990 production at Houston’s Alley Theatre, a $3.5-million production that has since been revamped. “Jekyll and Hyde,” the musical by composer Frank Wildhorn and lyricist/book writer Leslie Bricusse, is at the Orange County Performing Arts Center until Sunday, a pause on its scheduled 28-city, pre-Broadway tour.

So now “Jekyll and Hyde” has its cast, featuring powerhouse singers Robert Cuccioli (as Jekyll/Hyde) and Linda Eder (as Lucy, the prostitute/love interest who does not exist in the 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson novel). But good singers cannot breathe life into a musical almost completely reliant on formula and bombast. This is the mutant child of “Phantom of the Opera” and “Sweeney Todd.”

Nor can vocal pyrotechnics camouflage the musical’s major flaw: It has no characters.

Characters do exist in the Stevenson novel and in many of the book’s various stage and film adaptations. But those characters have been all but wiped away by lyrics and melodies so generic they could fit almost any situation.

When we first meet our Dr. Jekyll, he is pleading with a hospital board to let him conduct a human experiment using a chemical formula that will extract the evil from man’s personality. This formula, he promises, “would banish the madness of war.” As noble sentiments go, wanting to banish war is a good one. But that sentiment doesn’t evoke sympathy for a character, much less define him. Noble sentiments, in fact, don’t get much more generic than that.

In a similarly insipid vein, Jekyll’s fiancee, Lisa (Christiane Noll), makes a very grand show of being independent. She boldly stands up to her father (Martin Van Treuren), who harbors some understandable doubts about her intended. But the only thing Lisa seems able to sing about is her hope of finding herself in her lover’s eyes.

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It’s very difficult to care about characters who express paint-by-number sentiments in songs that always end without having expressed any thought other than the one they started with. Bricusse’s lyrics are lazy in other ways as well. For one small example, Hyde says he feels “lust like a raging desire” Well, isn’t lust always raging desire?

The two big voices do what they can to make their amorphous characters matter. Cuccioli, whose fabulous voice helped make “And the World Goes ‘Round” an Off Broadway hit, starts out with a clear, pure tenor for Jekyll. When he transforms into Hyde, his voice retards and thickens with the precision of a slowed-down turntable. He needs no makeup for his transformation.

Linda Eder, who first found fame on “Star Search,” possesses silkiness and power reminiscent of the young Barbra Streisand. She has a sinuous physicality not unlike Lonette McKee, and she belts her ballad “A New Life” out to the rafters with the confidence of a woman on the top of her game. If only she were singing about something.

Jekyll’s anthem-like “This Is the Moment” is in actuality not much of one. If ever a song was designed with an eye more to sell records than to its dramatic moment in the text, this song is it. In fact, the song is much more appropriate to an Olympic athlete (Nancy Kerrigan skated to it) than it is to Jekyll, a scientist who has decided to perform a peculiar experiment on himself.

And when the music swells to almost unbearably inflated proportions, its bombast is even mocked by the show’s set, which drops down from the rafters to reveal Jekyll’s lab, a mad scientist place featuring what looks like fetuses and brains floating in liquid. This is the moment, apparently, for complete dementia.

Otherwise, the show looks a lot like “Sweeney Todd,” which further underlines its failings. Set designer Vince Mountain provides a kind of industrial chic--brick walls and metal staircases, grimy windows and a second-tier catwalk that willfully recalls Eugene Lee’s “Sweeney” set. Larry Fuller’s musical staging for groups of people bopping all together in tight little covens recalls his work on both “Evita” and “Sweeney Todd,” but the movements come across here as pretentious, probably because of the nonsense the characters are hissing (“Murder in the night air/Murder, it’s a nightmare”).

Under Gregory Boyd’s direction, “Jekyll and Hyde” has just enough savvy to pass for a musical if a viewer hasn’t actually seen the real thing. But the true measure of a musical’s success, the human emotions, remain untouched. Perhaps if the audience were given some kind of chemical formula. . . .

* “Jekyll and Hyde,” Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, tonight-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7:30 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 2 p.m. Ends Sun. $19-$49.50. (714) 740-2000, (213) 480-3232. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Robert Cuccioli: Henry Jekyll

Philip Hoffman: Gabriel John Utterson

Christiane Noll: Lisa Carew

Linda Eder: Lucy Harris

Nita Moore: Nellie

With: Rob Evan, Martin Van Treuren, Dave Clemmons, William Thomas Evans, Bob Wrenn, Brad Oscar, Sandy Rosenberg, Ray McLeod, Melissa Bell, Michelle Mallardi, Julia Hughes, Lenny Daniel, Josh Rhodes, Heather Douglas, David Roberts, Allyson Tucker, Andie Mellom.

PACE Theatrical Group and Fox Theatricals present an Alley Theatre, 5th Avenue Musical Theatre and Theatre Under the Stars production. Conceived for the stage by Steve Cuden and Frank Wildhorn. Book and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse. Music by Frank Wildhorn. Directed by Gregory Boyd. Choreographer Larry Fuller. Sets Vince Mountain. Costumes Jonathan Bixby. Lights Howell Binkley. Sound Karl Richardson and Scott Stauffer. Orchestration Kim Scharnberg. Production stage manager Michael McEowen.