Theater Review : A Split Personality : Revised ‘Jekyll & Hyde’ still can’t decide what to be.

The latest changes made to the musical thriller “Jekyll & Hyde” manage to streamline and class things up a bit. Which begs the question: Is tasteful schlock preferable to risible schlock? Not necessarily. Generally speaking, not at all. I like my schlock straight, no chaser, no restraint or taste of any kind.

You get plenty of both--the tasteful and the risible--in this 1990 Leslie Bricusse/Frank Wildhorn musical. An earlier version played Costa Mesa back in 1995. Now the revised production is making its Los Angeles debut at the Pantages Theatre.

With the creators’ blessing, David Warren, the third of the show’s three official directors, has reordered some of the material, replacing certain songs with other ones, clarifying Dr. Henry Jekyll’s scientific and personal motivations on the front end. Warren and company make effective use of James Noone’s simple scenic design, reliant on photographic images of 19th century London.

The touring production feels lighter on its feet than the current Broadway incarnation. (The Broadway version recently passed its 1,000th performance, which says more about spillover from “The Phantom of the Opera” craze than anything else.) As the unlucky saloon songbird/prostitute Lucy, Sharon Brown belts those Wildhorn power ballads, ‘70s backbeat and all, right out of the park. The tunes are more like medicine balls than baseballs, so the achievement is genuinely impressive. A muscular performer in every sense, Brown makes the most of the material.

But the material remains the material--bland at best, feculent at worst. It’s not as if you can ignore the quality of the music and the lyrics here. This is a musical. They’re everywhere.

“Confrontation,” the Act 2 tour de force for the warring personalities of good doctor Henry Jekyll and bad boy Edward Hyde, represents some sort of highlight, as it has in every previous version of the show. It is a song requiring the performer (in this case Chuck Wagner, pretty good) to fling his raven locks back and forth, signifying first Hyde! then Jekyll! while lighting designer Beverly Emmons does the rest.

It’s the only musical in history featuring someone’s hair singing a duet with itself.

A well-worn 1886 story by Robert Louis Stevenson lurks underneath that hair, of course. Much has been altered. In the musical, Jekyll’s betrothed to Emma Carew, played by Andrea Rivette. (She’s charming, though her songs are all in the key of Doormat.) The night before his experiment with personality-altering formula HJ-7, Jekyll and his solicitor friend John Utterson (James Clow) visit a low dive down by the wharf. There Jekyll espies Lucy (Brown), who later turns into quasi-love slave, and worse, of the now-transformed Jekyll, better known as Hyde.

Librettist and lyricist Bricusse can’t get off the duality train here. The similes and metaphors keep chugging. “Life is terribly hard/When your life’s a facade”; “Lust, like a raging desire” (so that’s what it’s like); “I sit and watch the rain/And watch my tears run down the windowpane”; on and on they go and go. (Additional lyrics were supplied by Wildhorn and Steve Cuden.)

*

Wildhorn composes as if he’s getting paid by the key change. Many in the audience, it must be said, go semi-wild for the medicine-ball ballads, especially those sung by Lucy. Many, it appears, respond deeply to the work of an obviously sincere, obviously unpretentious songwriter such as Wildhorn.

On the other hand, if you find yourself resistant to Wildhorn’s brand of pop theatrical songwriting, at least as it’s practiced in “Jekyll & Hyde” and his in-epic Broadway flop “The Civil War,” well . . . at least Wildhorn’s “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” soon to land at the Ahmanson Theatre, goes in for some levity. It’s more of a goof.

This one’s a goof of a different, leaden sort.

* “Jekyll & Hyde,” Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Ends Sept. 19. $32-$57. (213) 365-3500. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

Chuck Wagner: Dr. Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde

Brian Noonan: Jekyll/Hyde, Sat. matinees and Sun. evenings

Sharon Browni Lucy Harris

Andrea Rivette: Emma Carew

James Clow: John Utterson

Robin Haynes: Lord Savage/The Spider

Bertilla Baker: Lady Beaconsfield

Dennis Kelly: Sir Danvers Carew

Steven Bogard, Roger E. DeWitt, David Elledge, Felicia Finley, Julie Foldesi, Dave Hugo, David Koch, Robert Krahen, Deb Lyons, Michael L. Marra, Kelli O’Hara, Karyn Overstreet, Max Perlman, Abe Reybold, Judine Richard, Jade K. Stice: Ensemble

Book and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse. Music by Frank Wildhorn. Directed by David Warren. Musical supervisor Jason Howland. Choreography by Jerry Mitchell. Set by James Noone. Costumes by Ann Curtis. Lighting by Beverly Emmons. Sound by Karl Richardson and Scott Stauffer. Fight director J. David Brimmer. Production stage manager Matthew G. Marholin.