Dueling Dualities: Jekyll & Hyde with a Madcap Twist
Crave up the pumpkins and string up the lights, we gotta get ready for ghouls and frights!
Seriously folks, there is no better time of year than October 1 through 31. Halloween, Samhain, Spooky Season, call it what you like, but this month, everyone is entitled to one good scare. That’s certainly an entitlement that Big Dawg Theatre Company has earned. The theatrical group has made a hobby out of horror-themed staged in the Season of the Witch.
Last year, their hilarious smash hit “Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors” was nominated for a slew of awards at the 2026 Wilmington Theater Awards, including Best Play. In 2022, Big Dawg’s own Steve “Hey Baby” Vernon took the stage as the main hero in the Wilmington premier of the Stephen King’s “Misery.” Big Dawg even raised the dead in 2024 with an adaption of “Night of the Living Dead!”
I sat down to discuss Big Dawg’s latest addition to their creepy collection, “Chemical Imbalance: A Jekyll & Hyde Play.”
“We (Big Dawg) have had a lot of success with our October shows,” Steve Vernon told me, proudly. “We’ve tried to rotate between traditional scary stuff and scary stuff with a sense of humor.”
The Sage of the Stage looks off into the distance, as if to pull some wise words out from the ether. “I do enjoy when there are philosophical questions that can be answered with a pie to the face,” Vernon says. “I just thought it had been a long time since I had seen any adaption of Jekyll & Hyde on the stage. So, when I was looking for shows, this show in particular really leapt up at me.”
While “Chemical Imbalance” may mark Chad Hsu’s first time as a director for the company, he has been a longtime collaborator with Big Dawg as an actor. Now, on the other side of the curtain, he tells me that his goal is to create a safe place for his cast to play and expression themselves. “That sense of enjoyment and playfulness that the actors experience in rehearsals, it transfers to the audience. They pick-up on that energy while watching the show, and it just increases their own overall enjoyment. They’re called plays for a reason, hello!”
Charlotte Fuchs seems to agree. “It might sound like a small thing, but to get to go to a rehearsal process, and be welcomed into an environment where you are invited to play and to get to play off everybody,” she says. “It is extremely rewarding. I feel incredibly lucky to have this opportunity.” (I notice Director Chad Hsu beams bright with pride as she says this.)
Another point that Hsu stresses is the wide array of plays that Big Dawg is brave enough to tackle. “One of the things I love about Big Dawg, as a company is that they are willing to produce shows that people haven’t heard of. I think it would be great if audiences would be more accepting of, not new plays, but plays that aren’t mainstream.”
Vernon chimes in, “It’s lovely that people are willing to take a risk on a new musical like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but you know, it’s nice to try some other things as well in October.”
“Chemical Imbalance” is a Victorian Era gothic tale of terror with contemporary sitcom sensibilities. Hsu puts it like this: “The show is a pretty close facsimile to the Robert Lewis Stevenson novella.
Other than the fact it’s meant to be fun and not realistically scary. Think of it as a period piece Friends.”
Doctor Henry Jekyll is a socially repressed physician who is trying to find a way to separate humanity’s evil side from its good. The not-quite-yet-mad-scientist achieves his goal a potion which manifests the “good doctor’s” inner darkness, transforming him into the dastardly Mr. Hyde! (Get it? Hyde/hide. This monster represents the emotions we “hide” from polite society.)
Jamie Lane has an interesting view of Jekyll and Hyde. “In a way,” he tells me, “Jekyll is already a duel role before Hyde even comes on the scene. Henry Jekyll is a repressed man.” Lane takes a beat then adds, “It’s also repression being unleashed. There’s this one line that I love: “No longer having the constraints of polite society.” [Jekyll] wants to be someone he isn’t able to be, which I think is pretty universal.”
I ask what techniques they’re using to show the transformation from man to monster. Vernon points to Lane: “Most of it is going to be Jamie, and he is doing a great job. It’s the physicality, the physical change is important to me.” The actor says he has seen renditions of the show that completely gloss over the transformation between the two characters: this will not be one of them.
Charlotte Fuchs plays an original character created for the play, Rosamunda. Fuchs notes an interesting interaction between Rosamunda and Jekyll: [Rosamunda] is a woman of Victorian England, talking to this male doctor, who is going on and on about how men are capable of such evil. When she finally gets a word in to ask, ‘Oh have you considered women to be a part of this category as well?’, Jekyll laughs her off! For her reply to be, ‘What a pity, I would have rather liked being thought capable of something,’ —that’s such an important line to me, and absolutely true to the world right now.”
As I’m about to wrap up and let the cast return to their rehearsals, Ash Ochs, who plays the role of Ambrosia Jekyll, returns us to a theme the play dives into: repression. “Like the original story, the play is about repressed sensuality, a forced upon politeness and, and, and…” Ochs lets her thoughts trail off, and she looks past me, with an amused look her face.
“…And for the record, let me state that one of my fellow actors is making it extremely hard to finish my point on repression!”
I look over my shoulder to bear witness to Jack Tylor, who plays the role of Lady Throckmortonshire (and yes, I checked my spelling on that name) standing atop a chair, gyrating his hips with his shirt tied up revealing his belly. Now I understand what Lane meant about the show’s rehearsals when he said he had seen and experienced things that an audience should never see.
Hsu looks across at me and says, “This is all going into the article, isn’t it?”
Gleefully, I nod yes. “How could it not?”
Hsu shakes his head, looking over the antics of his madcap cast, who are now collective cackling.
While The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde is an aged tale of a man split of two minds, it’s easy to conclude that “Chemical Imbalance: A Jekyll & Hyde Play” is going to a modern mad-cap madhouse, primed to entertain the Cape Fear this Spooky Season.
“Chemical Imbalance” opens Thursday the 15th in the Ruth & Bucky Stein Theater at Thalian Hall.
