El Armstrong was nothing if not honest.
The director of the Aurora Fox Arts Center’s season opener, “Jekyll & Hyde: The Musical,” laid out weeks before opening night that the show was going to be a provocative punch to the viscera.
“It’s really sexy and really violent and really violently sexy,” Armstrong, a longtime juggernaut of metro area theater, said of The Fox’s take on the ephemeral lesson in the duality of man. “I think we’ll push the edges of the envelope for the audience and that’s OK.”
He’s a modest salesman. It’s better than OK.
Through a dark and dingy steam punk aesthetic, as well as a salubrious dosage of sinister minor chords, The Fox’s “Jekyll” is an impressive rendering of a moldy tale. It’s brazen, it’s sensual and somehow — as the East Colfax crew has proven to be plenty capable of crafting time and again — it’s spectacular.
From onstage fires to snapped necks to mental illness to prostitution to religious infidelity, the show first introduced to the musical world in 1990 offers up some sort of morbid pageantry or titillating taboo for just about everyone. But in The Fox’s take, it’s the two beguiling leads — Jeffrey Parker as Jekyll and Lauren Shealy as his tortured love Lucy — who manage to shepherd the production away from the doldrums of the ordinary to a paradigm in how to quickly and effectively induce a genuine suspension of disbelief.
And there’s no better example of that tutorial in astonishment than Parker’s fast, frequent and ferocious transformation from the ill-fated Dr. Henry Jekyll to the villainous Edward Hyde. Charles Packard’s lighting design and Martha Yordy’s sharp musical direction can both take credit for the captivation during the first act’s initial Jekyll/Hyde metamorphosis, with red flashes and Aerosmith-esque electric guitar riffs that generate gobs of conniving mystery. After that first mutation, however, it’s all eyes on Parker, who adequately strangles and wrangles an almost impossibly demanding role. A la Clark Kent’s wimpy disguise of bifocals and a necktie, Parker’s physical transitions throughout the show don’t offer much in the way of character shift apart from a messy wig and occasional cape. Where he truly scores in earning the audience’s attention is through his skilled vocal inflections that seem to cross octaves by the throw of some invisible switch. Working in much the same manner as the steampunk aesthetic, it’s a smart, subtle way to get an audience in 2015 to buy into a story penned in 1886. Both “The Transformation” in the first act and “The Confrontation” in the second truly put Parker’s prowess on full display.
“It’s really sexy and really violent and really violently sexy,” Armstrong, a longtime juggernaut of metro area theater, said of The Fox’s take on the ephemeral lesson in the duality of man. “I think we’ll push the edges of the envelope for the audience and that’s OK.”
But as Armstrong hinted, what makes “Jekyll” shine most is how stark of a step it takes toward raunchiness and away from so much in The Fox cannon. Though the vulgarity isn’t likely to cause any P.C. police to tote picket signs down East Colfax any time soon, the production does not hold back on revealing plenty of sin and skin. On the contrary, it ardently leans into the profane with no dearth of death and several scenes brimming up-close-and-holy-wow carnal knowledge — the first act’s bluntly titled “Bring On the Men” is only a garter’s toss away from a performance at Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret in Downtown Denver. Not to be discounted, it’s an eyebrow raising approach that works to a surprisingly effective end.
So despite Armstrong’s short sell, Parker, Shealy and The Fox manage to breathe flashy, tarty life into a tale that has been told countless times on both stage and page over the past 130ish years, which is no small feat given the pervasiveness of Robert Louis Stevenson in, well, just about all of pop culture. With plenty of easy access points in the form of Frank Wildhorn, Steve Cuden and Leslie Bricusse-penned earworms, the show is, at the very least, an entertaining reintroduction to that time of year when skeletons hang from front porches and cavity clinics hum.