Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s gothic horror story Jekyll & Hyde comes to life with two male leads

Royal Winnipeg Ballet audiences are no doubt familiar with Val Caniparoli’s work from Val Caniparoli’s A Cinderella Story, a Technicolor, Rodgers and Hammerstein-inspired version of the storybook classic, set in the 1950s.

“This is the opposite of that,” the choreographer says of his latest work, Jekyll & Hyde, which makes its Canadian première at the Centennial Concert Hall this week with the RWB.

Based on the 1886 Gothic horror novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, this psychological thriller of a ballet finds Caniparoli using a palette several shades darker to tell the story of good doctor Henry Jekyll who is tormented by his twisted alter ego, Edward Hyde, set to a score of Polish composers (Frédéric Chopin, Krzysztof Penderecki, Henryk Górecki, Wojciech Kilar and Henryk Wieniawski).

“I’ve always been obsessed as a child with the old black-and-white monster films — The Werewolf, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Mummy — that was my thing. I loved it,” Caniparoli says.

Flash-forward to several years ago. Caniparoli, 73, is always looking for strong stories on which to hang a new evening-length ballet, though he says he’s sometimes shot down by companies who are nervous his more risky ideas won’t sell tickets.

But that wasn’t the case with Jekyll & Hyde.

“I hit pay dirt with this one because whenever I suggested it, every company that I even mentioned it to was like, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ and this is way before COVID. There were five or six companies lining up to possibly share it,” he says.

Jekyll & Hyde made its world première with the Finnish National Ballet in November 2020.

That date isn’t a typo. Finland, at that point in the pandemic, was one of few places that hadn’t fully locked down owing to a host of factors, including its small population, a relatively low number of cases and, crucially, the fact that Finland considered artists essential workers.

Since then, the ballet has been presented by Kansas City Ballet and Salt Lake City’s Ballet West, before finally making its way north of the border and into the RWB’s 2024/25 season. The RWB will also tour it to Ottawa next month.

Unlike the dual good-vs.-evil role of Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, which is famously performed by the same ballerina, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are portrayed by two different dancers. Corps de ballet member Logan Savard will be Jekyll to principal dancer Stephan Azulay’s Hyde on March 6 and 8, while soloist Michel Lavoie will be Jekyll to second soloist Marco Lo Presti’s Hyde on March 7 and 9.

It’s fairly unusual, in ballet, to have two male title leads.

“I’ve always wanted to do a duet between the same person,” Caniparoli says.

“It was a trend to do same-sex duets, but in my mind, I want to do something different. And thinking Jekyll and Hyde, two different people — but imagine that you’re the same person. You’re struggling with yourself, good and evil, and that’s what really planted the seed of where I was going to go with this, having two dancers portraying Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

In adaptations of this story — and there have been hundreds, across artistic mediums — Mr. Hyde is often depicted as a monstrous figure, the beast within made literal. Even Looney Tunes had Bugs and Tweety turn into hairy, knuckle-dragging beasts in Hyde and Hare (1955) and Hyde and Go Tweet (1960), respectively.

But Caniparoli wanted to go a different way.

“I turned it around to where Mr. Hyde is a stunning, very debonair figure because that, to me, is the biggest monster. It’s not that horrific-looking person, it’s that one that uses that (charisma) and entraps you that you don’t expect it to happen,” he says.

Just as there have been many adaptations of Jekyll & Hyde, there have been just as many interpretations, which is likely why this Victorian-era story continues to resonate.

The threads people have plucked out of the tale over the decades — homophobia, violence against women, mental illness and addiction — remain contemporary issues.

Caniparoli describes his ballet as intense.

“The best compliment I’ve been getting in every city that’s ever done it, whether they really liked it or didn’t like it, is ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’” he says.

“That’s not easy to do these days.”

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Jen Zoratti
Columnist

Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen.

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