One of numerous striking boundary-busting scenes in the riveting Ballet West production of Val Caniparoli’s Jekyll & Hyde occurs just past midpoint in the second act. Hyde (David Huffmire) commandeers the attention when he arrives at Deacon Brodie’s Tavern, the after-hours refuge for the sophisticated Victorian gentlemen to indulge their libertine pleasures whatever they might be. Hyde is sexually aggressive with Rowena (Emily Adams), the prostitute. Meanwhile his callous behavior intimidates onlookers who are bewildered by the behavior of someone who is so familiar to them. Hyde asks Madame to send Rowena over to his home later that evening. Hyde also sets his sights on Sir Danvers Carew (Jeffrey Rogers) and hands him a calling card, knowing that Carew, who has his own sexual secrets, will follow him into the street. Hyde bashes Carew to death with the ornate cane that Nellie Carew (Katlyn Addison), Jekyll’s fiancée, gave him. The cane is spotted with blood.
It is a stunning scene, which sets up the dramatic apex for the remainder of the ballet. Caniparoli’s astute reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novella reminds us that Carew’s murder is not the dead end that many originally thought it was in the original storyline. Indeed, it is Jekyll’s maid who later that evening becomes the critical eyewitness (Kristina Pool, who also takes the role of Stevenson’s nurse) when Hyde strangles Rowena to death.
Val Caniparoli. Photo Credit: Beau Pearson.
As mentioned in The Utah Review’s preview, the theatrical demands for Jekyll & Hyde emphasize the unique place this production holds in contemporary ballet. Based on the opening night audience’s vigorous endorsement of Caniparoli’s rendering of the Stevenson literary classic, Ballet West has set outstanding benchmarks in every element of this production. The dancers have settled marvelously into the twin technical demands of their roles, as ballet artists and actors.
The theatrical ride is thrilling from the first moments, with the A-flat notes of Chopin’s Raindrops Prelude (Op. 28, No. 15) setting the prologue. Stevenson (Tyler Gum transformed magnificently into the pale, anguished hallucinating addict) slips into an opium-induced dreamy haze and imagines the characters of his famous story. In the mental health asylum, which takes audience members on a path unlike anything else in a traditional ballet story, artists from Ballet West II and other ballet trainees perform a macabre dance, with vintage hospital beds as props for the patients. Jekyll (Jordan Veit, in a masterpiece display of dance matched precisely with character gestures) and his colleague Dr. Lanyon (Loren Walton) enter the asylum chamber. Lanyon protests against the grave risks his colleague dares to take in his psychiatric experiments and his quest to develop a potion. Jekyll hopes to persuade his wealthy friends to support his research but his demonstration collapses in failure and professional embarrassment.
Val Caniparoli. Photo Credit: Beau Pearson.
There is wonderful foreshadowing here. Dejected, Jekyll does not hesitate to take risks in order to vindicate his failure in the asylum — including experimenting upon himself. Thus, the seeds of the crises of moral and cultural authority for Jekyll and how they will eventually affect his friends, who belong to the professional gentleman class, are sown. In the first act, there are fleeting moments of Jekyll finding it progressively difficult to control and conceal Hyde. We anticipate the inevitable instance when Hyde will overwhelm Jekyll, who insisted on proving to his peers that his research was not “balderdash.” In one scene, with the menacing effects of the potion taking hold, Jekyll struggles to rein in his sexual urges, when he sees Rowena at the tavern.
Early in the second act, Hyde’s appearance at a ballroom party discombobulates Nellie (the quintessentially graceful Katlyn Addison), his fiancée. Unlike the first act when Jekyll danced with her, Hyde is more seductive, ready to abandon all intimations of gentility. But, he ends the dance abruptly, when he realizes the drug’s effects have weakened. He retreats hastily to the London streets but ends up killing a boy with whom he collided. The music heightens the sense of the grotesque caricature surrounding Hyde which has emerged — the Victorian gentleman seeking to revive his professional reputation but being transformed instead into a contaminated, utterly callous soul.
This sets up Caniparoli’s best case for ballet as an effective vehicle for adapting this famous Gothic fiction story into a riveting psychological thriller with contemporary sensibilities about class, character and the complexity of humans. Veit and Huffmire, respectively as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, delineate their characters with the same finesse in gestures as they achieve in their dance movement. Jekyll articulates the troubling emotional complexities of his psychological motivations. Hyde epitomizes a synthetic figure that is just as finely delineated in establishing his existence, which Huffmire underscores perfectly. By merely brandishing his cane in public as a gesture of his presence, Hyde shows us the lack of emotional depth but nevertheless his existence is as concrete as Jekyll’s. Stevenson’s recurring appearances throughout the ballet facilitate our comprehension of the meaning behind the author’s original text reference to Jekyll’s lament about why “polar twins should be continuously struggling.”
Following Carew’s fatal bashing, Jekyll’s associates acknowledge the details are, as Stevenson wrote, “sucked down in the eddy of the scandal” and the string of murders are “at once so callous and violent, of his vile life, of his strange associates, of the hatred that seemed to have surrounded his career.” In Stevenson’s original, Jekyll talks of man not being “truly one, but two.” And, as the Ballet West production successfully demonstrates, we see the remaining characters on stage (that is, the circle of Jekyll’s friends and associates) unable to feel and process the repercussions of their own actions or to have the will or capacity to change. Meanwhile, Jekyll alone is left to struggle against his dual character, culminating in an extraordinary balletic interpretation by Veit and Huffmire that produces a final burst of spine-tingling moments in the ballet.
The Ballet West Orchestra, led by Jared Oaks, supports the production beautifully, with well balanced sound that includes highlights of especially fine playing by the strings and pianist Nicholas Maughan. Indeed, the company handles the acoustics challenge with very good results, especially as this production uses a hybrid score that combines the orchestra with electronic elements. This unique orchestration was created for the Finnish National Ballet, when it premiered in 2020, and it captures the mood of the adapted narrative. It is an effective logistical solution given the Capitol Theatre’s orchestra pit cannot accommodate the full orchestra, as would be required for music captured in the recorded portions. Curated and arranged by Ramona Pansegrau, music director and conductor at Kansas City Ballet, the score includes music by Chopin and a slate of Polish composers Henryk Górecki, Wojciech Kilar, Krzysztof Penderecki and Henryk Wieniawski.
The production continues through Nov. 2 and ticket sales are very brisk. For more information, see the Ballet West website.