Looks like Tony Award nominee Tony Yazbeck will lend his directing talents to a different Frank Wildhorn musical. Yazbeck and Grammy Award winner Jason Howland will team up as director and music director, respectively, for Manhattan Concert Productions' upcoming concert staging of Jekyll & Hyde at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall on February 14, 2021 at 8PM ET. Yazbeck had previously been announced to helm a concert staging of Wildhorn's The Civil War for that same date.
Based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic thriller, Jekyll & Hyde is the gripping tale of a brilliant mind gone horrifically awry, set to a score by Wildhorn with book and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse. The story follows Dr. Henry Jekyll, a physician whose experiments with human personality create an evil and murderous counterpart. A devoted man of science, he is driven to find a chemical breakthrough that can solve some of mankind's most challenging medical dilemmas. Rebuffed by the powers that be, he decides to make himself the subject of his own experimental treatments, accidentally unleashing his inner demons along with the man that the world would come to know as Mr. Hyde.
Set to play Cary Grant in Lincoln Center Theater's forthcoming production of Flying Over Sunset, Yazbeck last appeared on Broadway in the musical revue The Prince of Broadway. He received a Tony Award nomination for his performance in the 2015 revival of On the Town and has also appeared on Broadway in Finding Neverland, Chicago, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, Gypsy, A Chorus Line, Never Gonna Dance and Oklahoma!
Jekyll & Hyde will join MCP’s previous Broadway Series concert performances, including Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Broadway Classics in Concert, Crazy for You, The Secret Garden, Parade, Titanic and Ragtime. The concert staging will feature a chorus of over 200 singers from across the United States and the New York City Chamber Orchestra. The cast and creative team will be announced at a later time.