STRANGE CASE: JEKYLL & HYDE, Lifeline Theatre. Perhaps what’s most impressive about Lifeline’s adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ghoulish variation on the doppelganger tale is that it restores the story’s inherent creepiness, rescuing it from the Grand Guignol kitsch of the Broadway musical, more than a dozen films, and one pretty awful early Who song. Steve Totland’s script, apparently set partly in the present day, and Ann Boyd’s impressionistic direction make this an altogether eerie and somber affair with nary a moment of levity–less than appropriate for the children I saw attending a Sunday matinee. Employing a sextet of excellent actors, this 80-minute production chronicles the doomed Dr. Jekyll’s tragic transformations into the demonic, soulless Mr. Hyde, rarely losing its hypnotic sense of dread; Cathy McCullough’s effective puppetry represents some of Hyde’s more hideous crimes.
