by Kris Harrell
Troy University’s Theatre and Dance department’s production of “Jekyll and Hyde '' will debut April 13 after months of preparation from both students and faculty.
Premiering on Broadway in the 1990s, this over-the-top production is a musical adaptation of the novella: “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
“You're looking at about 1,000 man hours on the show just to get the set, not to say the direction and everything,” said Tommy Newman, lecturer of Theatre and Dance. “So, it’s a very big, time-consuming process.
“A lot of hard work on the part of the faculty and the parts of the students has gone into making it a making it the set.”
Newman said that not much of the original concept has changed as the production team is sticking with what they had originally planned.
“The use of dance and theatrical lighting has added a lot to telling the story and making the more theatrical elements of the play clear,” Newman said.
While waiting on the set to be completed, actors rehearsed in different locations, such as the Elm Street studio. They’ve worked their way up from minimal set pieces and props to the full set in the Trojan Center Theater.
John Alloway, a freshman theater major from Troy, Alabama, who plays Dr. Jekyll in the production, said his method of finding inspiration proved challenging.
“It was difficult to find inspiration from the original source material, just because of how little information you actually get from the characters,” Alloway said. “It’s the first time that I've felt like I really needed to do something, I really needed to get it right.
“I'm just doing my best to make him as human as possible. I just want people to understand him in the work that he's doing, which is what I'm mostly trying to portray when I step onstage.”
Caleb Quick, a sophomore theater major from Prattville, Alabama, said he is still exploring his role as Mr. Hyde.
“My favorite part of the rehearsal process is to explore my character and see what's different, and see different ways that I can humanize him in any way,” Quick said. “In a lot of the productions that I see, he’s just played as just evil, nothing redeeming about him in any way.
“The thing that I find redeemable about Hyde is that in all of his madness, I think he just wanted the life that Jekyll had – he wanted to find his own love in a way.”
Students can purchase tickets for a showing of Jekyll and Hyde at the Troy Theatre and Dance website. The production runs April 13-18.
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