Theater : Bullish Over Broadway : Composer Frank Wildhorn is intent on restoring--and revolutionizing--the Great White Way.

Like the divided hero of his first musical, “Jekyll & Hyde,” composer Frank Wildhorn appears to have two professional faces.

He is an old-fashioned romantic, hellbent on restoring Broadway to its former place in the mainstream of pop music--emulating the likes of such songwriters as Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern, who dominated both the Great White Way and the nation’s radio waves. His credentials? A dozen years spent in the sleek offices of Los Angeles’ music scene, churning out pop songs such as Whitney Houston’s “Where Do Broken Hearts Go,” Kenny Rogers’ “Don’t Look in My Eyes,” and “This Is the Moment,” the anthem from “Jekyll & Hyde,” a favorite of ice-skating champions and beauty contestants everywhere.

But he is also a bomb-thrower, at war with Broadway’s snobbish aesthetes. His work, which in addition to “Jekyll & Hyde” includes “The Scarlet Pimpernel” and “The Civil War,” is considered emblematic of a new corporate mentality in theater that is banking on mass appeal and is not focused on just the 10 square blocks of Manhattan and its churlish critics.

“Jekyll & Hyde,” based on the 19th century classic tale by Robert Louis Stevenson of a doctor unleashing the monster within through his medical experiments, opens Tuesday at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, on its second national tour. When it first hit Broadway in 1997, the New York Times called the Victorian bodice-ripper “leaden, solemnly campy.” Newsday called Wildhorn’s “The Scarlet Pimpernel” “galumphing and dunderheaded.” His “Civil War” received better but still tepid reviews. And though Wildhorn finally got his first Tony nod last season for his “Civil War” score, he lost to Jason Robert Brown, the composer of “Parade.”

Lucky for Wildhorn, then, that he has rich backers--Cablevision and Pace, the latter a division of SFX, the entertainment behemoth that just swallowed the ailing Livent. It helps, too, that he has audiences on his side: “Jekyll & Hyde” and “Scarlet Pimpernel” have generated enough fans to make the shows appear critic-proof. “Jekyll & Hyde” is in its third year, and the much worked-on “Scarlet Pimpernel” will reopen on Broadway this fall after its second face lift and a brief out-of-town spring-summer tour. (It will be seen at the Ahmanson in May.)

In fact, last season, Wildhorn became one of the few American composers in Broadway history to have three musicals running simultaneously, though his triumph was short-lived when “Civil War” closed after a three-month run.

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“This is an industry which should support, encourage and inspire new talent and new voices, and yet there is this disdain and cynicism,” said the affable 40-year-old composer during a recent visit for which he was dressed in loose-flowing black pants, gray T-shirt and his omnipresent baseball cap. Whatever bitterness he may have--and the New York City-born composer betrays none--is no doubt mitigated by the view unfolding before him as he sits on the veranda of his quietly lavish Westchester country home: 9.5 acres of verdant fenced-in pasture land on which two beautiful thoroughbreds graze, trailed by two longhaired German shepherds.

The idyllic lifestyle is Wildhorn’s present to Linda Eder, the Minnesota-born country girl he met in 1988 after she became a “Star Search” talent show champion. Part of the gift is a breather of sorts from their prodigious output of the last three years: She was the original star of “Jekyll & Hyde”; she performed during the ceremonies for last year’s Goodwill Games in New York, for which Wildhorn was composer of original music and executive producer of the opening ceremonies. She is also featured on all three concept albums for his shows, and she has recorded two albums of her own, both of which he produced.

Her latest CD is an all-Wildhorn program (with the exception of the standard “One for My Baby”) and features some songs from his upcoming shows “Havana,” in which Eder will play a big-band singer who is a mobster’s daughter in 1940s Cuba, and “Alice,” a new show based on the Lewis Carroll stories, on which he is collaborating with magician David Copperfield.

Eder is also his wife of 18 months and now the mother of their first child, Jake Ryan, born just hours after this reporter’s visit. As Wildhorn held forth, Eder could be heard padding around the 13-room home, nesting.

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“In the 1980s, I thought the theater was becoming a museum,” Wildhorn says. “I was following a vision, an idealistic way of building a bridge between the pop world and theater world. And so I’ve taken a lot of shots. I’m called ‘that pop guy.’ What do they want me to be? ‘The Unpop Guy’?

“I don’t understand why pop is such a bad word anyway. It wasn’t in Irving Berlin’s time.”

Yet, even if somebody had told this self-described “blue-collar professional writer” that Broadway can be a tough nut to crack, chances are he wouldn’t have listened. “Frank has the toughest hide of anybody I know,” says Freddie Gershon, president of Music Theatre International, which licenses rights to musicals, including Wildhorn’s. “It’s the sheer proliferation of his projects which protects him from the rejection and abuse. For a writer, he’s remarkably un-neurotic. He doesn’t agonize. He loves writing schmaltz.”

Gershon adds that Wildhorn’s goal of serving as a bridge between the pop music and theater world depends on whether he can have more than just one crossover hit (“This Is the Moment”). “It’s tough because the formats are so fragmented,” he says. “But if he does it, he will have done musical theater a terrific service.”

Wildhorn says that what has kept him going is what got him started in the first place: “Jekyll & Hyde,” whose long and checkered creative journey began more than 15 years ago, when, as an undergraduate majoring in history at USC, Wildhorn began adapting the story with writer Steven Cuden. When veteran Leslie Bricusse (“Dr. Dolittle”) signed on as a book writer and co-lyricist four years later, the show gained critical mass, receiving its premiere at Houston’s Alley Theatre in 1990. “Nothing I had ever done in pop music had ever allowed me to flex the creative muscles in the way I did then,” Wildhorn says.

The tinkering then began on what became the longest pre-Broadway tour in history (it was seen at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in 1995): Stars, directors and set designers all changed before the show opened on Broadway, and the retooling continues.

As in the German production of “Jekyll”--the first of eight scheduled international productions--Wildhorn restored two numbers to the U.S. tour that had been cut for Broadway: “Bring In the Men” and “I Need to Know.” The American production stars Chuck Wagner, who, as a USC chum of Wildhorn, was among the first to hear and sing the songs from “Jekyll.” Wagner was also the original star of the 1990 Houston Alley production.

With more revisions under the direction of David Warren, the touring “Jekyll” is receiving better reviews than the Broadway production, although in recent weeks it has been drawing about 50% on the road--one of many unsettling signs that the Wildhorn juggernaut may be slowing. And despite its long run, Broadway’s “Jekyll” has recouped only 60% of its capitalization. “Scarlet Pimpernel” is awash in red ink, some say to the tune of $19 million. And the brief run of “Civil War” has put the kibosh on a couple of projects connected with it, though a scaled-down touring concert version is scheduled to begin early next year.

There also are rumors among the Broadway cognoscenti that Pace is reconsidering its financial commitment to Wildhorn, which Gary Gunas, executive vice president of Pace, denied in a recent interview. Gunas said that the company is presently casting the road tour of “The Civil War” and is developing “Havana” and a new gothic musical based on the Dracula legend with Wildhorn. “We love Frank and his music, we realize the potential there, but we’ve learned we have to produce him smarter than we have been. We just haven’t done it right,” Gunas says.

“Heartland America responds so strongly to his work that, at least in terms of ‘The Civil War,’ we were foolish not to go to them first, fine-tune the marketing and the properties and then come into New York,” Gunas adds.

The composer is characteristically philosophical about such setbacks and suggests, not too convincingly, that the summer doldrums are to blame for poor box-office for “Jekyll” on the road. But he still sounds bullish about his exhausting slate of future projects. And while some critics may be sharpening their pens for the next Wildhorn show, they could find that the monster is hydra-headed. In his capacity as creative director of Atlantic’s theatrical record division, Wildhorn hopes to convince some of his colleagues in L.A.’s pop music scene to join him in revolutionizing Broadway.

“There’s great talent in L.A., which could be doing musical theater, but it’s not even on the radar screen for many of these guys,” Wildhorn says. “And those who are interested tell me, ‘Frank, are you crazy? Look how you’re treated. And you want us to put in the same emotional commitment?’ I know one guy [a very popular composer and recording artist] who’s afraid that if he does try it, and fails, that his record company will be pissed off at him.”

And how does Wildhorn respond?

“I tell him, ‘Look, it’s tough, but chances are you’ll never be more alive and creative,’ ” he answers. “And I know that sometime in the next 10 years, the next classic American musical is not necessarily going to originate in New York but somewhere between the Hudson and the Pacific. And why shouldn’t it be by a Latino or black pop composer from L.A.? Why shouldn’t the Great White Way become the Great Rainbow Way? It’s going to happen. Why not be one of those who make it happen?”

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“JEKYLL & HYDE,” Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd. Dates: Opens Tuesday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Sept. 19. Prices: $32 to $57. Phone: (213) 365-3500.