The Wildhorn Jekyll and Hyde musical is like, the musical equivalent of celery. You’ve consumed something but you’ve also consumed literally Nothing. It’s like a fake musical that characters in a movie would be watching in the background of a scene. You’ve listened to it for an hour but can’t remember anything about it. It’s as exciting as tap water. Fantastically flavorless.
Having only consumed two of Wildhorn’s musicals (Jekyll and Hyde and the Scarlet Pimpernel) I will say that makes sense!
It seems like Wildhorn musical runtimes are made up primarily of “songs where characters are singing PASSIONATELY but also generically, so you can separate the song from its context and pretend the plot/characters are something else.” And I think that’s the main thing that makes a musical theater song really good for AMVs.
The Wildhorn Jekyll and Hyde musical is like, the musical equivalent of celery. You’ve consumed something but you’ve also consumed literally Nothing. It’s like a fake musical that characters in a movie would be watching in the background of a scene. You’ve listened to it for an hour but can’t remember anything about it. It’s as exciting as tap water. Fantastically flavorless.
Bonnie & Clyde opened on Broadway on December 1st, 2011. With music by Jekyll and Hyde’s Frank Wildhorn, this musical is based on the true story of the titular criminal couple as they go on their famous robbing spree in Depression-era West Texas. A side plot follows the home life of Clyde’s brother Buck (another criminal), as his religious wife Blanche tries to get him to turn himself in after he and Clyde escape from jail. I’m gonna start this off by saying this feels like the most complete Frank Wildhorn musical. Jekyll and Hyde had an incredibly rich score, but a bare-bones book that sometimes doesn’t make sense. Its universally hated 2013 revival replaced the wonderful score with new heavy metal orchestrations and screeches that really suck. Wonderland was an interesting concept for the first half of Act One then quickly became one of the worst musicals ever made. Death Note (which never went to Broadway) is, well, based on Death Note (I tend to stay away from musicals based on manga). Bonnie & Clyde just feels complete. The score is wonderful, the book does an incredible job of showing the humanity behind two of the most infamous criminals in American history, and Laura Osnes and Jeremy Jordan, two of the best actors working today, starred in the title roles. However, the show was slow at the box office and closed after only a four week run on Broadway. It still had an audience however, and wasn’t a complete bomb like most other Frank Wildhorn shows (it’s interesting to me that Jekyll and Hyde ran for four years and never recouped its 7 million dollar investment). What went wrong? It can be assumed audiences just saw Frank Wildhorn and immediately dismissed it. In his NYT review of the Jekyll and Hyde revival a couple of years later, Charles Isherwood referred to Frank Wildhorn as “the crabgrass of Broadway.” And after five critically panned box office bombs before Bonnie & Clyde’s debut, I would have agreed with him. However, this is different from his other works. Bonnie & Clyde is better than anything Wildhorn has done before or since, and it’s a damn shame it never got its due on Broadway.
There’s some artstyle dissonance between Utterson and Henry here, so I may address that in a redraw if I do one.
This was an idea I came up with while talking with @gerrysherry about Utterson summoning Jekyll, and I wanted to draw it. (Well more that I had the idea for the drawing first). Also I referenced the scene where Shirou summons Artoria because.
I somewhat referenced MazM’s version of Utterson (especially for the hair) and got a smidge of inspiration from @kurakuradonn for Utterson’s design, and man did I have a hard time figuring out the eyes. Which I might end up fixing anyways to make him look more anime-ish.
So…. I’ve got some news…. THE GLASS SCIENTISTS IS GETTING PUBLISHED!! AAAAAH!!!!! Even though this comic has consumed my nights and weekends for the last *counts on fingers* seven years now, I never thought this day would come. Thank you to everyone who has stuck by the comic for all these years!!
