Enduring Appeal From Restaurants To Theaters, Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde Continue Their Attack On Pop Culture

In the sort of multimedia assault that entertainment conglomerates must dream of, a new figure - or perhaps one should say “figures” - has emerged that seems to embody the cultural contradictions of the 1990s. From stage to screen, even to restaurants, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde seem to be everywhere.

The decade began in 1990 with a Jekyll-and-Hyde television movie starring Michael Caine and the publication of Valerie Martin’s best-selling novel, “Mary Reilly,” which tells the story through the eyes of a maid in Dr. Jekyll’s household.

Since then, literature’s most famous dual personality has lent his names to a Greenwich Village restaurant, to an elaborate club in the West 57th Street area that has become Manhattan’s unofficial theme park and to a big-budget musical that has already spawned two CDs of its score, even though it is not scheduled to open on Broadway until next May.

And that’s just for starters. Savoy Pictures released in big cities its comic gender-bending version of the tale, “Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde,” starring Tim Daly and Sean Young. That movie was more miss than hit, but Julia Roberts will be starring in Stephen Frears’ film of “Mary Reilly” opposite John Malkovich’s Dr. Jekyll, due out at Christmas.

Even Eddie Murphy is getting into the act, with a remake of Jerry Lewis’ 1963 Jekyll-and-Hyde-inspired comedy, “The Nutty Professor,” which Universal plans to release next summer.

While this resurgence of interest in the Jekyll-and-Hyde story may be just coincidental, it seems particularly appropriate for a people as deeply conflicted as the American public appears to be in the ‘90s: The public cries out for a balanced budget, then cries out even louder when politicians mention raising taxes.

Everyone seems to be appalled by the sex and violence on television. Yet the networks say they’re only giving the public what it wants. Certainly the analogy has not been lost on the viewers of Court TV.

“It’s bizarre, really, but so many people have pointed out the unintentional parallels with the O.J. Simpson case,” said Leslie Bricusse, who wrote the book and lyrics for the Broadway version of “Jekyll and Hyde.” “What O.J. really was about was the unbelievability of it - that this great hero could possibly be another person.”

Or as the neighbors are so often quoted as saying, “He seemed like such a nice person.”

In pointing out the perennial appeal of the tale, Frank Wildhorn, who wrote the music for “Jekyll and Hyde,” said: “All the other monsters from Gothic literature are external. In this one the monster is the monster within us all.”

Mythology has always had its angels and devils, and 19th-century literature abounds with works dealing with the double (or doppelganger) with an alternate personality. But it was the character created by Robert Louis Stevenson in his 1886 novel “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” that in the public imagination came to embody this psychic split. Stevenson’s master stroke was to integrate the two personalities in one body and give them contrasting outer appearances, translating psychological struggles with good and evil into physical manifestations.

“Everyone can relate to that because everyone has it going on inside them to some extent,” said D.R. Finley, the owner of the Jekyll and Hyde club and restaurant in Manhattan.

Yet, on another level “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” can be seen as a tale of the dangers of repression. It is only because Dr. Jekyll wants to separate his good and evil sides that the monstrous Mr. Hyde is released.

“What you’re dealing with is a very basic kind of fantasy, which is the difference between the inner self and the outer self,” said Richard Slotkin, a professor of American studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. “The idea is that what the inner man has is all those elements of character that have to be suppressed to live as a person in civilized society.”

In the majority of the 30-some film and television versions of the tale that have been released since the one-reel “Modern Dr. Jekyll” in 1908, what is suppressed is usually sex.

In a silent 1920 version starring John Barrymore, Jekyll is a paragon of virtue who, as the subtitles put it, suddenly yearns to “yield to every evil impulse, yet leave the soul untouched” after eyeing the charms of an Italian dancing girl in one of the fleshpots of London.

In the 1932 version, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, the sexual aspects become more pronounced: Fredric March’s Dr. Jekyll literally breaks into a sweat when he is ordered to endure a 10-month engagement before marrying his sweetheart. “Can a man dying of thirst forget water?” he cries, and later embarks on his experiments, stating, “I want to be clean, not only in my conduct, but in my innermost thoughts and desires.” When Hyde emerges, seemingly more ape than man, he shouts, “Free! Free at last!” and embarks on an orgy of sex, sadism and murder that still shocks today.

But a sexual reading of “Jekyll and Hyde” is not the only way to tell the tale.

“You are free within the framework of the idea to make your Hyde story whatever you want it to be,” said Bricusse, the lyricist. While his show retains the sexual elements, his Hyde also extracts a murderous revenge on the scientific establishment for the rejection of Jekyll’s scientific ideas.

In “Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde,” Dr. Jekyll’s great-grandson is trapped in a dead-end job at a fragrance company while his female alter ego masterfully manipulates her way up the corporate ladder, then tries to take over the body they both share. It is no stretch to see the film as addressing male anxiety over the presence of women in the work force.

In Jerry Lewis’s “The Nutty Professor,” Julius Kelp, a bumbling academic, turns into Buddy Love, a vain, bullying swinger who is far from lovable, yet whose liberation actually helps Julius integrate the repressed elements of his personality, thus becoming a better man. In this case, the “happy ending” version of the story, releasing Hyde (perhaps an early version of “your inner child”) is seen as a positive act because he is later reintegrated with Jekyll.

“As the cultural notion of the content and nature of the inner self changes, the vision of Mr. Hyde will change,” Professor Slotkin suggested, adding that the core narrative could be told “in terms of power, sexuality, violence, gender or class.”

One factor that has remained constant, Bricusse said, is Jekyll’s belief that as Hyde “I can remove the responsibility from myself: It’s not me; it’s him.”

David S. Price, the director of “Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde,” said he believes that part of the appeal of the story is the fantasy of “doing something as someone else and blaming it on them; as Hyde you’ve got an excuse.” He even sees parallels in the case of the Menendez brothers.

“They didn’t do it; they’re fine,” he said. “It was the bad potion they drank; it was the parents.”

Sure, tell it to Oprah. The fact is that Jekyll does ultimately pay the price for Hyde’s actions. Perhaps the current interest in Jekyll and Hyde has to do with the country’s internal dialogue about conscience and individual responsibility.

Price takes a more practical Hollywood view.

“You’ve got to go back a couple of years to when these projects were being developed,” he said. “You had ‘Dracula’ done by Coppola and ‘Frankenstein’ being done by Branagh and De Niro. People just had horror stories on their minds and went, ‘Hey, nobody’s done “Jekyll” in a while.”’