First Nighter: <i>Jekyll & Hyde,</i> <i>Orphans,</i> <i>Collapse</i> Bow to Mixed Results

If someone grabbed you on the street and yelled in your face for the next two and a half hours, what would you do? Well, the cast of therevival at the Marquis scream until your eardrums are ready to burst.
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In this Saturday, Sept. 8, 2012 photo, cast member Deborah Cox poses during the party for the opening night performance of "Jekyll & Hyde" The Musical at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, in La Mirada, Calif. Cox loves the "beginning of a new chapter" as she brings "Jekyll and Hyde" to Broadway. (Photo by Ryan Miller/Invision/AP)
In this Saturday, Sept. 8, 2012 photo, cast member Deborah Cox poses during the party for the opening night performance of "Jekyll & Hyde" The Musical at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, in La Mirada, Calif. Cox loves the "beginning of a new chapter" as she brings "Jekyll and Hyde" to Broadway. (Photo by Ryan Miller/Invision/AP)

If someone grabbed you on the street and yelled in your face for the next two and a half hours, what would you do? To begin with, you wouldn't let it go on for that long. You might even look around for a cop. Well, the cast of the Jekyll & Hyde revival at the Marquis scream until your eardrums are ready to burst, but not only do most of the spectators put up with the din, they can't wait to leap to their feet at the curtain call.
Maybe they think they're at a rock concert. Maybe they are.

Anyway, the main noise polluters are Constantine Maroulis, who plays alter egos Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde, and Deborah Cox, the brothel prostitute of his living nightmares. Granted, neither one caterwauls throughout all of Frank Wildhorn's each-song-sounds-like-the-preceding-one score. What they and their steel-pipe colleagues frequently do is begin the redundant power ballads softly and then slowly up the decibels to roof-cracking levels -- with music director Steven Landau encouraging his orchestra to battle the singers for prominence.

By now, everyone knows or should be acquainted with The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 response to the way repressed sexual instincts in Victorian England caused many in the populace to feel as if they harbored within themselves two warring personalities. Freud called the battling interior fraternal twins the id and the superego.

In Stevenson's notion, Dr. Jekyll -- having been rejected by a scientific board in his bid to conduct experiments on humans to alter their dualities for the better -- decides to experiment on himself, The attempt goes don't-fool-with-Mother-Nature awry and leads to complications of his engagement to socialite Emma Carew (Teal Wicks) and to the demise of numerous unwitting citizens.

Searching for victims, as the uncontrollably marauding Hyde, Maroulis repeatedly stalks across Tobin Ost's panels-laden set under Jeff Croiter's tenebrous lighting and prompts a foolish question. It's foolish because it asks for logical developments in a script not overly concerned with logic. (Director-choreographer Jeff Calhoun isn't either.)

The foolish query: If the five board members who gave Jekyll his thumbs-down are all done in, why doesn't the London police force look into anyone holding a grudge against the hypocritical quintet? Indeed, where is even a single police detective? Indisposed while looking for Jack the Ripper? Surely not. When the rich are targets, the poor get dropped in a snap of the fingers.

Oh, well, only die-hard Jekkies need attend.

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Although Lyle Kessler's Orphans is strongly associated with the 1985 Steppenwolf production starring John Mahoney, Terry Kinney and Kevin Anderson -- directed by Gary Sinise -- it premiered in Los Angeles's Matrix Theater with Joe Pantoliano, Lane Smith and Paul Leiber. The movie starred Albert Finney. It adds up to several talented thesps getting mileage from the endeavor.

And now it's revived in Manhattan with Daniel Sullivan directing and Alec Baldwin, Ben Foster and Tom Sturridge acting. You know why the latter three signed on: Any actor would sacrifice eye-teeth to be in it. Not much more than a slick spin on Harold Pinter's three-hander, The Caretaker, the play offers great opportunities for showing off. So much so that you wonder why, no matter what was going on during director Daniel Sullivan's rehearsals, Shia LaBeouf chose to take his much publicized premature powder.

As in Pinter's Caretaker, an older man -- this one called Harold, no less (in homage?) -- arrives at a sinister home (ubiquitous John Lee Beatty's tall, greyish set) where one menacing brother and one apparently troubled brother, reside in a weirdly synergistic state. Also as in the role-model drama, it looks as if the intruder is at the mercy of the residents until it doesn't look quite so much that way and the interaction among the trio takes on the appearance of a surrogate father-surrogate sons situation.

At the outset, the showiest role is Sturridge's Phillip, because he gets to behave like a feral animal. He spends his ample downtime jumping from staircase banister to couch to window-sill and back. Sturridge's athleticism is something to behold -- a blatant Tony nomination set-up. But so are the somewhat less flamboyant character twists that Baldwin as Harold and Foster as Ben get to chew on and spit out -- often literally. And maybe this is the place to say that celebrated as he is for 30 Rock, et cetera, Baldwin remains an underrated Broadway figure.

With all the mesmerizing histrionics, it's no mystery why so many Orphans adherents don't bother to notice there's not much original play here -- just a fancy-pants actors exercise.

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There is something of a play going on in Allison Moore's Collapse at the Women's Project City Center Stage II, but it's ultimately undone by too much heavy-handed symbolism.

Initially, Hannah (Hannah Cabell and David (Elliot Villar) look as if they have a handle on their marriage and that the accident David had in the not too distant past -- his car fell into deep waters during a bridge collapse -- is no longer as much a psychological set-back as it has been. Even the unexpected arrival in Minneapolis of Hannah's wacky sister Susan (Nadia Bowers), newly evicted from her West Coast home, doesn't instantly loom as radically disruptive.

But Moore believes people erect facades about their situations, and that's what transpires among these three. Eventually, Hannah -- exasperated at David's stay-at-home drinking -- sneaks out to an AA meeting for guidance and reassurance. Lacking the resolve to enter, however, she lurks outside and encounters the exiting Ted (Maurice McRae), who invites her to a one-on-one meeting and then makes a play for her. Or does he, since he confesses to being impotent?

This encounter, which does lead somewhere, becomes a thorn in the Hannah-David side, and an outcome is that David decides the thing he needs to do is prove he's recovered by climbing what's left of that partially destroyed bridge.

He's able to do this -- but ludicrously -- since set designer Lee Savage has accommodatingly erected a bridge section that hovers upstage. Why playwright Moore figured she needed to play on the idea of collapse to cover both the accident and the foundering marriage is anyone's guess, But the result is her ultimately turning the play, directed by Jackson Gay, into an unfortunate sight gag.

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