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ick Toscan, then chairman of the drama department, recalls the day he first met Wildhorn in fall 1977: “This kid shows up in my office, wearing a baseball cap and carrying a cassette recorder,” says Toscan, now dean of arts at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The drama chair’s usual response to such unsolicited calls was, “leave it there.” But Wildhorn wasn’t budging until he’d been heard. The crudely produced demo featured a bare piano and Wildhorn’s un-trained voice, but Toscan was nevertheless blown away.
“The work was really good,” he says, explaining that new musicals – even by professional composers – are typically “terrible” on the first try. “Frank’s songs sounded like real Broadway songs. The lyrics were not the awkward things we often heard. They rhymed, they made sense, they were kind of interesting. The melodies were something you could actually remember.”
After consulting assistant chair Bill White and the drama program’s re-doubtable artistic director John Houseman (The Paper Chase), Toscan green-lighted the project for workshop performance – a small-scale show with minimal costumes, no scenery or lighting, a small band and free admission.
The 19-year-old composer had other ideas.
“Frank, in typical entrepreneurial fashion, got hooked up with a modest Hollywood producer who thought it might be interesting to do a full production of the show,” Toscan recalls.
The producer fronted enough money to cover costumes, lighting, a sound system and sets. Toscan picked up the slack from his own budget. Finding a stage was the next hurdle. As luck would have it, the heavily-booked Bing Theater was dark during winter break, creating a brief window of opportunity for an unscheduled mainstage production. The musical was hastily cast – Wagner recalls auditioning without an appointment and easily landing the lead because “they needed someone tall who could sing.”
As cast members hustled to learn their parts over Christmas vacation, Wildhorn hammered out full orchestrations. In a tactic he has since refined to a science, the composer arranged during rehearsals for a two-day session in a recording studio. As the musical came together at USC, its creator hustled the “cast recording” around the city.
On opening night, the show dazzled. “It really looked beautiful. The costumes were stunning,” recalls USC production manager Jack Rowe, then a guest director who was brought in to “play doctor” in the late stages of Christopher’s genesis.
Wagner recalls a dancer, on point, bourréeing down a ramp, her drape blowing down the length of the stage, then falling away to reveal the child, Christopher, in his mother’s arms.
“It was expensive, elaborate, handmade, gorgeous, with live studio musicians,” Wagner says, “and it kicked ass.”
Leaving nothing to chance, Wildhorn made sure that Christopher got noticed.
“Frank always has been a very good salesman,” says Cuden, who spent hours with Wildhorn in the Bing’s lighting booth, where the composer often retreated to watch unobserved as his brain-child unfolded. “It was amazing how much heat there was on it locally,” Cuden recalls. “It’s very rare – for a college play – that you have agents and managers and lawyers coming to see the show. At this play, you did.”
Among the talent scouts was an entertainment attorney with theatrical ties in England. Christopher actually came within a whisper of being professionally produced in London, Toscan says, but the deal collapsed at the last minute.
Even so, the experience had given Wildhorn his first taste of success. It proved addictive.
“Putting together that show had so much to do with the rest of my musical journey of life,” Wildhorn says. “The romance I have with theater started with the process of writing something at 4 a.m. one day and having hundreds of people share that passion with me.”
asking in Christopher’s afterglow, Wildhorn began to search for a new project. Cuden stepped forward with an incomplete manuscript, playfully titled Aesop Over Easy. The master electrician called it a verse play, but Wildhorn instantly recognized the rhyming lines for what they could be: lyrics.
Over the next two years, Wildhorn and Cuden collaborated on a string of experimental projects. “We wrote 20 songs of a show called The High and Mighty Caesar, but it didn’t go anywhere,” says Cuden. “We wrote a show called The Last Tsar. That never saw the light of day either.” Then, in 1980, the two Trojans started writing a show they called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
It was hardly serendipity. Wildhorn and Cuden arrived at the concept by a calculated process of elimination. “We were both enamored of [Sondheim’s] Sweeney Todd,” Cuden says, “and wanted to do something in a dark gothic vein.” They considered musical adaptations of the legends of Dracula, Frankenstein, the Phantom of the Opera or Dr. Jekyll, and ultimately settled on the last.
“If Jekyll & Hyde reminds you of Lloyd Webber,” says Wildhorn, “bear in mind that it was written and conceived before Phantom of the Opera. The germ was actually born at USC in 1980.”
The first version “was not very good,” Cuden admits. The demo, featuring Chuck Wagner’s voice, elicited only half-hearted interest from a producer. The creative team shelved the show for several years.
By now, Wildhorn had left school (sans degree) and was working as a professional songwriter. Cuden, too, had moved on to other projects. But the friends kept plugging away on musicals in their spare time. In 1986, they decided to resurrect their gothic show, overhauling it from top to bottom. Renamed Jekyll & Hyde, it retained only one song from the original: “Murder, Murder.”
This time, they smelled success. A music publisher acquaintance “fell in love with it,” and agreed to produce the musical on Broadway.
It was 1987. Cuden recalls actually sitting in a theater in New York, watching the show being cast. “We had a director, a cast, a producer,” he says. Then came Black Monday. The infamous stock market crash sent investors running for cover, leaving Jekyll & Hyde in free-fall.
Wildhorn grabbed for a parachute. To restore investors’ confidence, he brought Academy Award-winning lyricist Leslie Bricusse on board. With song credits that included Dr. Doolittle, Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and Goldfinger, Bricusse was a heavy-hitter. Steve Cuden gracefully stepped aside in 1988.
“I’m the Pete Best of Jekyll & Hyde,” he says playfully, referring to the original Beatles drummer who was replaced by Ringo Starr.
Cuden doesn’t hold a grudge (well, maybe a little). “This was eight years of my life,” he says. “But I’m proud to say they didn’t throw the baby out with the bath water.” Five or six (depending on the production) of Cuden’s songs remain in the show, and he enjoys lucrative “conceived by” credits.
Now a screenwriter with more than 70 produced teleplays to his credit, Cuden is again working on a musical with a USC School of Theatre composer – recent graduate Rachael Lawrence ’99.
Eventually Jekyll & Hyde premiered at Houston’s Alley Theatre in 1990. It took seven more years, three major rewrites, two concept albums and a national tour to bring the musical to Broadway. By then, Wildhorn was a veteran songwriter, with some 250 published songs to his credit, and 50 million records sold.
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