"DR. JEKYLL AND MR HYDE" SET TO SCARE AT HARTFORD STAGE

To celebrate the spookiest time of the year, the Hartford Stage has conjured up a new, novel and scary version of that Victorian classic by Robert Louis Stevenson penned in 1886, the result of a nightmare that is the origin of the macabre tale. Screw up your courage and venture into the dark and dangerous world of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” scaring audiences until Sunday, November 3. This new adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher and skillfully directed by Melia Bensussen, confronts the age old question of good and evil, are we all one or the other or rather a mixture of each in a varying degree.

Nathan Darrow’s Dr. Henry Jekyll is a physician consumed with the conscious mind, with research, with experimental drugs, with the struggle of good impulses fighting off impulses of evil. When he swallows a tincture of ingredients, he creates a variety of alter egos, depending on the combination of drugs taken and the amount of each in his system. This inability to control the results of his experiment leads to uncontrollable and often disastrous results. Yet in each a variation on a theme, a differring version of Mr, Edward Hyde, is created.

On a majestic thrust stage created by Sara Brown, we encounter the characters who people Jekyll’s world, those who support him and those who oppose him: Peter Stray’s Dr. H. K. Lanyon, Omar Robinson’s Dr. Gabriel Utterson, Nayib Felix’s Sir Danvers Carew and also The Inspector, Sarah Chalfie’s Elizabeth Jelkes and Jennifer Rae Bareilles’ Mr. Poole. Do not for an instant believe you are safe from murder just because you once were on Dr. Jekyll’s good side. Anyone and everyone is fair game in this tale of dual consciousness, of lightness and darkness, of salvation and condemnation, sanity and madness. Dark desires are clearly not easy to control, when appetites and impulses range out of command.

For tickets ($30 and up), call the Hartford Stage, 50 Church Street, Hartford at 860-527-5151 or online at boxoffice@hartfordstage.org. Performances are Tuesday to Saturday at 7:30 p.m with matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. Added shows are Thursday, October 31 at 1 p.m. and Sunday November 3 at 7:30 p.m.

The theater has just announced that $9,000,000 of its $20,000,000 Set the Stage Endowment has already been reached for this nationally recognized live theater where stories are told.

Witness this macabre dance nightmare where psychological repercussions reign and good impulses and bad impulses run amok, where a potion has the power to create evil and the beast in man’s nature can be so easily unleashed.