Hyding

kdsorceress and I went to an MIT production of Jekyll & Hyde last night. It was clearly a student production — there were microphone issues, off-key singing, muddy audio that made it tricky to follow the plot — but they had some lovely, threatening, high-energy choreography, performed under eerie green and purple lighting, and a fabulous almost-burlesque whorehouse number with fifteen or twenty performers whirling about in red light and corsetry. Once Jekyll transformed into Hyde (whose vocal range, I think, better suited the actor) near the end of act I it rollicked along nicely. Kat developed a stage-crush on Utterson, Jekyll's lawyer and confidant, played cross-gender by a young woman with a nine inch mohawk. The two female leads, Emma (the fiancée) and Lucy (the prostitute), had very strong voices, and drew massive applause whenever they sang. Hyde was boisterous and scary — a bit of a hybrid of Beetlejuice and Oogy Boogy from A Nightmare Before Christmas — and since the show was being performed in a small, intimate space (the Sala de Puerto Rico in the Stratton Student Center) he was quite effectively threatening. He had some sort of telekinetic Force powers (Darth Hyde?), which were beautifully realized by a horde of skulking, black-clad demon hounds, who eddied around him like smoke and raised his victims and weapons into the air.

The best moment, though, was unplanned. There was a Jacob's ladder in Dr. Jekyll's laboratory. It zapped merrily along the first time it was turned on, cheerfully purple, but the arc got stuck between the lower contacts at the start of the second act, and glowed brighter and brighter white (me watching it wincingly) until it finally burst into flame. They stopped the production, and Jekyll and Emma vamped onstage for a minute or so while the flame fluttered merrily in its Plexiglas box, and the audience wondered what was taking them so long to find a fire extinguisher. Then, heroically, Utterson strode in from the wings, tore the case from its moorings, and — like it was a birthday cake — blew the fire out, to thunderous applause. Hooray! went we, and Melt! went Kat's heart.

We missed the first two numbers, because the 1 bus sucks frozen chainsaws — we waited over 25 minutes for a bus that is scheduled to come every nine. After the show, we only waited ten minutes for it before walking up Mass Ave. to Harvard, reminiscing about our own days in theater and partaking of a snowball fight. Walking > MBTA, at least this time.