Sunday, December 05, 1999
'Jekyll' composer has plenty of 'pop' musicals in pipeline
BY JACKIE DEMALINE
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Just when it seemed Broadway might recover from a decades-long British invasion that put spectacle over storytelling (Cats, Les Miz, Phantom, et. al.) along comes Frank Wildhorn, the man who may succeed in transforming an art form into a product line.
Last spring Mr. Wildhorn, at 40, was the first composer in more than two decades to have three shows running simultaneously, if briefly, on the Great White Way: Jekyll & Hyde, The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Civil War.
Coming up on the assembly line: “Havana,” he says by phone from Florida. “That's for Linda (wife Eder, original star of Jekyll). It's Big Band meets Afro-Cuban. There's The Legend of Dracula. In the next few weeks or months we'll make a major announcement.
“I'm working on Bonnie and Clyde with Don Black, on Blade Runner with Jim Steinman. Bobby (that's avant-garde composer Robert) Wilson and I are talking, and David Copperfield and I are working on an Alice in Wonderland.” With his Civil War collaborators he's working on The Other Side of Paradise, about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
Mr. Wildhorn's work is almost universally reviled by critics, but audiences love it, or at least they love Jekyll. Robert Louis Stevenson's gothic adventure about the repressed doctor whose chemical sampling brings out the murderous beast in him (the dark and dangerous Mr. Hyde) is in its third year on Broadway.
After debuting in Houston in 1990, the musical spent the early '90s being worked and re-worked on its way to Broadway and back on tour. In a brilliant marketing move, the album was released long before the show saw a live Broadway audience.
“This Is the Moment” became enough of a break-out to be covered by several artists. It quickly became a staple for pageants (including Miss America) and national presidential conventions. (Jennifer Holliday sang it to Bill Clinton.)
Cincinnati audiences saw an early version four years ago on its way into New York, where it finally arrived in 1997, carrying with it a groundswell of national fans.
Still evolving
Back on the road, Mr. Wildhorn says the show is more like the original tour than it is like Broadway. “It's much closer to my original vision,” he says. It will include songs cut from Broadway.
Jekyll, he says, “is still going through an evolution. Most successful shows become cookie-cutters. Jekyll is completely the opposite. No two productions are alike.” That's because “we collaborate with different producers in different markets.”
He and his partners are happy to accommodate the needs of presenters in Tokyo, Madrid, Berlin. Theater has a different audience every night, he points out, “So why can't a play be different? The only thing that stops people from going back and re-working is money.”
Mr. Wildhorn was introduced to the Broadway musical as a teen-ager when he was was home sick with the flu and happened to watch West Side Story and Jesus Christ Superstar back-to-back on television.
That was about the time “my musical life had started, and I was exploring an enormous amount of musical voices.” He knew early on he wasn't going to be a performer. “I sing so bad it's terrible,” he laughs. “I have enormous soul and no tone.”
Pop chops
He started writing and putting on shows at University of Southern California, but when he graduated nobody was interested. “I had pop chops,” Mr. Wildhorn says. “Record producers would say, "Why are you writing for theater? Come write pop.' So I did. You gotta make a living.”
Between 1982 and 1991, “I had 200 songs recorded and sold 50 million records. Ironically, it was the best training ground I could have had. I learned to write from a lot of perspectives. On Monday I'd write for Whitney Houston, on Tuesday for Kenny Loggins, on Thursday for a rock 'n' roll band.”
Jekyll was actually inspired by the famed Broadway production of Dracula starring Frank Langella. Mr. Wildhorn started playing with the idea almost 20 years ago. As for Pimpernel, “I didn't know what the hell it was. I got a call from a New York producer.”
He wrote The Civil War (coming to the Broadway Series in January) for his then-13 year old son, Justin, who was finding American history boring. “So I asked him, what if Hootie and the Blowfish sang the words of Frederick Douglass? Would you listen then?”
Mr. Wildhorn isn't alone in the popping of Broadway. Other boomer-friendly projects are “original” musicals that are actually revivals of movies including Footloose, Fame and Saturday Night Fever.
He isn't too impressed with the screen-to-stage projects which, he points out, bear only a superficial resemblance to his.
“My work is meant to be performed onstage,” he says. “We throw around the word "pop' too easily. Pop and popular are not the same thing.”
Mr. Wildhorn is delighted to be taking his hit at the theatrical version of the Berlin Wall. For decades, New York theater was dominated by an old guard “and we've lost a generation of fantastic writers because it seemed to the writing community that (Broadway) was a place that didn't want them.”
The fact is, he says, if live theater wants to reach a younger generation, “it's going to have to be with music that sounds friendly to their ears.
“The good news is, whether it's me, or Disney, or the movies-to-musicals, Broadway is becoming more accessible.”
IF YOU GO
• What: Jekyll & Hyde.
• When: 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday through Dec. 19.
• Where: Aronoff Center for the Arts Procter & Gamble Hall.
• Tickets: $35-$55. 241-7469.
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