YMMV / Jekyll & Hyde

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Hyde still looks like Jekyll, just with loose hair and an evil grin. He brutally murders the people that pissed Jekyll off, and he rapes the woman Jekyll was attracted to but didn't dare become involved with because of the engagement to Emma, whom he later assaults at the wedding. This show makes it easier than almost any other version of the story to interpret Hyde as simply a name Jekyll gives his repressed depravity. In the source story, Jekyll straight up explains that that freedom is why he makes the potion, and it's why he continues to imbibe it. Even in the musical, Jekyll states that the potion makes him feel "twice as alive and tenfold more wicked, which intoxicates and delights me like wine." He's addicted to the freedom, and keeps up with it, not attempting to stop until his actions have gone well past the point of being unforgivable. The cut song "Reflections" directly quotes and paraphrases the novel as Jekyll comes to terms with being Hyde even after people are murdered.
• Award Snub:
  • Robert Cuccioli's hugely praised leading performance in one of Broadway's most difficult roles won the precursor awards but ultimately lost the Tony to James Naughton in Chicago, who was also quite acclaimed himself, but didn't have anywhere near the showcase that Cuccioli did. Probably not helping matters is the original Broadway production had very poor reviews, while Chicago was without a doubt the musical event of the season.
  • Linda Eder's work being snubbed by the Tonys also received it's share of complaints. Similar to Cuccioli, she did better at the precursors where she was nominated.
  • The score was not nominated, even though it's arguably more enduring than the actual nominees of that year.
• Awesome Music:
  • Both Jekyll and Hyde get a ton of them, with "This is the Moment", "Confrontation" (in which Jekyll and Hyde duet), "I Need To Know", and "Alive" being the stand-outs.
  • Lucy does get a handful of really good numbers as well, though since her original actress was dating the writer it should be no surprise.
  • Many of Jekyll's songs are just pure awesome.
  • The leitmotif of the show, Facade, pops up multiple times, in which the Ensemble comment on the evils of human nature, with each reprise gaining a much more sinister connotation.
• Breakaway Pop Hit: "This is the Moment" in the 90s.
• Broken Base:
  • Later versions of the musical included a subplot about Jekyll's terminally ill father who becomes the catalyst for the creation of the potion. The base is fairly evenly split between those who like the addition and feel it creates more sympathy for Jekyll, and those who despise the addition for that very reason as they feel it undermines the intentional moral ambiguity of the character. The fact that the subplot has absolutely no basis in the source material just adds more fuel to the fire.
  • There's also a small but fairly significant one surrounding the Love Triangle. Essentially, you've got one camp that doesn't mind it at all and feel it adds to the tragedy of the story as well as neatly providing an external representation of the struggle between Jekyll and Hyde, one camp (who tend to be staunch fans of the book) that hates the idea of either Jekyll or Hyde having anything resembling a love interest and feel the time spent on the women singing power ballad after power ballad would have been better spent further exploring the struggle between Jekyll and Hyde, and one camp who, while appreciating the fact that both Lucy and Lisa/Emma are interesting characters in their own right as well as providing roles for two women in what would otherwise be an entirely male main cast, dislike how much attention is given to the romances in the post-Broadway versions as opposed to the more balanced take in the earlier concept albums.
• Cant Unhear It: Depending on who you ask, Anthony Warlow or Robert Cuccioli are the definitive Jekyll and Hyde, the former originating the part on the album, whilst the latter originated the part onstage.
• Catharsis Factor: Playing Hyde lets actors let loose, sing about, and act on their basest urges without having to actually do them.
• Evil Is Cool: Hyde represents everything Jekyll enters his experiments seeking to isolate and destroy, but his decision to use himself as the subject of the experiment proves a fatal error when this trope comes into play. Rather than being repulsed by Hyde's monstrous nature, Jekyll is initially fascinated by his darker side and envies his ability to act without morals or inhibition to enjoy life to the fullest. Unfortunately, Jekyll dramatically underestimates what Hyde is capable of with nothing holding his impulses in check while overestimating his ability to control him; once Hyde realizes suicide from the success-obsessed Jekyll is an empty threat, and that Henry is no longer strong enough to contain him even with altered drugs, he begins to rampage with impunity, alerting Jekyll to the danger he has placed himself and everyone he knows in only when it's far too late to regain control of the experiment.
• First Installment Wins: While each version of the show has its fans, most agree that the early pre-Broadway concept albums with Colm Wilkinson and especially the full 1994 album with Anthony Warlow are probably the best, for reasons ranging from the story focusing much more on the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde and all it represents rather than on the love triangle that dominates the later versions, Simon Stride being more fleshed out as a secondary antagonist, the orchestrations fitting the Gothic tone of the story as opposed to the more 90s pop/2000s rock orchestrations that appeared on Broadway, and the sheer amount of passion each performer brings to their roles (as well as Wilkinson and Warlow both having the singing and acting chops to pull off the switch between Jekyll and Hyde perfectly even without visuals).
• Fridge Horror: In the script, Jekyll is hiding in the darkness in Lucy's room. After he calls out to her, Hyde takes control, leading to Lucy's murder. Jekyll was so close to bidding Lucy goodbye without incident. Hyde even says, to Lucy's "For a moment I thought it was someone else," "For a moment, it almost was."
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The surreal imagery and lyrics in "The World Has Gone Insane" call to mind the infamous NES game.
• Narm:
  • "Confrontation" consists of Jekyll and Hyde in a heated argument. In many productions both are portrayed by the same actor and without prerecorded lines as in the concept albums, which demands both solid acting chops to pull off convincingly and little room to catch a breath. As a result, sometimes the song is staged with one half of the actor having hair and makeup to look like Hyde, and the other made up normally to look like Jekyll. When they switch parts of the song, the actor turns so that either his left or right side is exposed to the audience - complete with lighting cues. The concept is already flawed - but in the hands of a bad actor, it is absolutely hilarious.
  • The ending comes up so abruptly and melodramatically it can be hard to take seriously, let alone process what the heck just happened. The original ending was a bit more drawn-out, but ended on an extremely dramatic violin flourish.
  • The entirety of the infamous filmed version with David Hasselhoff is either this or Narm Charm, but everyone agrees that Hyde's expressions during 'Dangerous Game' are pure narm.
• Narm Charm: "Confrontation" is a song that essentially has an actor having a duet with themself with very on-the-nose lightning cues to mark who is Jekyll and who is Hyde. It's ridiculous and shouldn't work, but in the hands a truly great actor and singer, or in the case of David Hasselhoff, someone who truly brings his 'A' game, the song can still work marvelously.
• Questionable Casting:
  • Among the castings are theatre royalty Colm Wilkinson and Steve Barton, weird additions like David Hasselhoff and Sebastian Bach, and perhaps most infamously Takashi Kaga. And that's just for the character of Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde.
  • David Hasselhoff was the final Jekyll/Hyde in the show's Broadway run. One of the performances was videotaped and released on DVD. Some consider his performance to be Narm Charm of the purest kind, though it's clear that, skills aside, he certainly put his all into the role.
  • Takeshi Kaga was actually quite well-known for starring in musicals in Japan prior to his Iron Chef days — he had also played Jean Valjean and Jesus, among other roles.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: A lot of the songs and scenes in the musical, especially early on, are about Jekyll, Emma, or Lucy singing about love and being in love. It takes about 45 minutes for Hyde to show up.
• Signature Scene: The most famous scene/song in the musical is either Hyde's "Alive," where he gleefully rampages through London, or "Confrontation," where Jekyll and Hyde duet as they struggle for control of the body.
• Strangled by the Red String: While we at least have a pretty good idea why Lucy loves Henry as he was the only one to treat her with any kindness, Emma and Henry are more generically in love and they rarely express any qualities or personality about why they do. A cut song showed how they met and fell in love, but not why.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • The board members' unwillingness to sanction Jekyll's work is actually understandable. Although they're all portrayed as elitist, closed-minded hypocrites, and if they had said yes he might have been able to better control the experiment, it's completely unethical to perform an experimental, possibly dangerous, treatment on an asylum patient, as he requested—such a subject, among other things, would be unable to provide informed consent.
  • There's also the matter of the Bishop of Basingstoke's question to Jekyll when he finishes pitching his idea: "And what if you're right, Jekyll, and you do manage to separate good from evil? What happens to the evil!?". While he asks it in an extremely confrontational and over-the-top way and he's leagues away from being a wise or decent human being, it doesn't change the fact that, as anyone remotely familiar with the story will know, that question was an extremely important one. The fact that Jekyll refused to even answer it and instead deflected it with emotional appeals should have been grounds for dismissal of the proposition right then and there.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The '97 Broadway production's changes—Lucy being a singer, the Spider and Gwenny supplementing Simon Stride, and the amount of cut, rearranged, or reshuffled songs from the concept albums—were fairly disliked by fans and reviewers, and subsequent productions tend to walk back the changes where permissible.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Lisa/Emma contributes little to the story aside from singing several love songs. Lucy does much the same, but they contribute to her characterization of abuse and feeling alone, while Emma just loves Henry and little else. In the concept albums Lisa admits as much, saying her world revolves around Henry and his dreams.
• The Woobie: The DVD release features Colleen Sexton as Lucy and she sure looks like someone killed her puppy. Lucy's character in general is this, as she idolizes Jekyll purely because he was nice to her.

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