DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE

“What we most want to be, we are”

Book and Lyrics by Joseph Traynor

Music by Omri Lahav

Based upon the novella by Robert Louis Stevenson

Synopsis

Behind the fog of Victorian London Dr Henry Jekyll seeks to separate the good and evil within man in the hope that he might be free of his own secret desires. But his experiment instead unleashes upon London his evil twin in the form of Edward Hyde. Soon everyone around Jekyll is caught in the middle of this battle for one mans salvation.

History of the Show

Most adaptations start with a novel, well most do. Not quite in the writing of “The Strange Case of…” What really inspired me to write a musical of that particular story was a film, a damn good film version with Frederic March. This was way back in 1997 when most of my inspiration did indeed come from films. My first draft was basically a straight adaptation for the March film for the stage. Infact if you compared my first draft with the final draft of the show we have now one would presume they were written by two different people (rather ironic considering the subject matter of this story). It was not until I read the original Stevenson novel much later that I realised what I was neglecting in choosing to adapt one of the many film versions (twenty the last time that I counted, not to mention dozens of rip-offs). If you’re going to adapt a novel faithfully you have to stick as close to the source material as possible. Not to say that you can’t lend your own voice to the piece, or be as creative as your imagination can handle, but the “spirit” of the material must remain. And on “The Strange Case of…” that’s what I did.

What we’ve did in other thirty drafts, fifty songs and three years work is show Jekyll’s own evils, instead of painting him as the saint and Hyde as the sinner. The two are the same, the exception being that Hyde acts on these impulses and Jekyll tries to deny them. It is a story of dark and light, of human weakness and sorrow. But at its heart is a love story. Jekyll wants to make the world better for his love, Kathryn, but to do that he must rid himself of the desires he is cursed with. We get to see that love flourish and then fall apart. Our emotions must be roused and we must connect with the characters.