THE BROADWAY MUSICAL.

`Titanic,' `Jekyll & Hyde' & `Play On!'

In a burst of optimism before the Tony Awards deadline, Broadway sprang forward with a song on its lips and pride in its heart. Six weeks saw the opening of eight musicals, including The Life, a portrait of prostitution in Times Square in the 1980s; Steel Pier, about a dance marathon in the 1930s; and a revival of Candide, Leonard Bernstein's scored version of the Voltaire story.

The congestion led the entertainment weekly Variety to speculate darkly on the economic viability of "Broadway's crowded waters." It seems appropriate, therefore, that two of the musicals entering with the most advance publicity have toyed with the theme of hubris.

Jekyll & Hyde, an operatic version of the Robert Louis Stevenson novella, drapes a lurid Victorian London behind its hero/villain, an arrogant scientist with the morals of Raskolnikov and the creepy sex appeal of a rock star. Titanic--yes, a musical about the maritime disaster--also emphasizes human ambition: Characters who rashly praise the ship as "a poem and the perfection of physical engineering" learn to their cost that they were wrong. Interestingly, both plays contain variants on a single line. "What makes you think you have the right to play God?" an irate hospital trustee protests, reining in one of Dr. Jekyll's unethical medical experiments. And the Titanic's designer asks its captain the same question when it's time to allot the lifeboats. (Titanic succeeded in garnering five Tony Awards. Jekyll & Hyde did not win any.)

Both musicals push issues to the front, perhaps partly to deflect a certain type of reproach. Ever since the onslaught of Andrew Lloyd Webber extravaganzas, with their take-no-prisoners special-effects, critics have accused Broadway musicals of being more spectacle than theater. Not that the two genres have ever been completely separate: Even the loopy French avant-gardist Antonin Artaud, whose idea of spectacle ran to "cries, groans, apparitions ..., hieroglyphic characters, ritual costumes, manikins ten feet high representing the beard of King Lear," was on to something when he observed, in the 1930s, that spectacle was integral to the theater's magic.

What critics of Broadway extravaganzas condemn is the tendency of producers and theater-goers to rate technology and "production values" more highly than the thought or vision that the play expresses. Lobbing a few concepts across the orchestra pit, in the manner of Titanic and Jekyll & Hyde, staves off such censure, while allowing the audience members to flatter themselves they have procured a little instruction with their entertainment.

In fact, a veneer of philosophy provides excellent camouflage for the kind of voyeuristic thrills these two productions supply. Titanic offers paint-by-numbers conflicts to pass time until the ship sinks. When the formidable Charlotte Cardoza (Becky Ann Baker), dressed in hot pink spangles, invades the men's smoking room and demands admittance to their card game, we realize that the old world order is giving way to the new. When a chantey sung by the stoker (Brian d'Arcy James) in the gloomy boiler room introduces the Astors and friends dining in the first class saloon, we understand the absurdity of class.

But it is impossible to care how these social disparities affect the play's underdeveloped characters, like the starry-eyed Irish emigrants who fall in love in third class, or the cuddly Mr. and Mrs. Isador Straus (Larry Keith and Alma Cuervo), last seen drinking champagne on the upper deck. The production points a big ironic arrow at passengers and crew not because they are unusual or complex, but because they are playing cards or falling in love as if they had their whole life ahead of them, and they're on the Titanic.

After intermission, irony darkens to the titillating horror of a '70s' disaster movie. The set's different levels, representing the various parts of the ship, cant ever more steeply as the vessel is sucked into the depths. This mechanical wizardry permits one interesting moment, when the ship's morose, baldheaded designer, Thomas Andrews (Michael Cerveris), doomed but suddenly inspired, starts sketching other projects as a grand piano crashes down on him.

A tilting set, however, is no substitute for engaging dialogue, interesting characters, and memorable music, all of which are in shorter supply here than lifeboats. The tragedy we spy on is singularly unmoving: We look at it, but cannot get involved. To experience the frisson without splurging on a ticket, one might simply enter the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre's box office: The names of the Titanic passengers have been inscribed on the walls, annotated with asterisks, to show who died.

While Titanic fights for breathing space on the Great White Way, Jekyll & Hyde has already won the first few rounds. Through out-of-town productions and two advance recordings, this feverish melodrama, with music by Frank Wildhorn and book and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, has acquired a cult following and a national fan club.

Obviously the musical's creators have hit upon the right mixture of music, violence (serial killing, sexual torture, a bishop who is burned alive, etc.), and pseudoprofundity. Certainly the ballad-heavy score, which is frequently stirring, matches the mood of hysterical gothicism. A set that seems in constant motion--scrims, scaffolding, smoke, a vial-infested laboratory that slides forward, an intermittent backdrop of the brooding Thames--intensifies the phantasmagoric atmosphere.

Whereas Stevenson's story kept an eerie silence on the subject of Edward Hyde's specific misdeeds, the musical is explicit to the point of absurdity, giving Jekyll/Hyde (the swashbuckling Robert Cuccioli) two love interests--one madonna, one whore (Christiane Noll and Linda Eder, both possessed of angelic voices)--and following him zealously as he stalks victims through the gloom-shrouded streets.

But Bricusse's real innovation is to splice every fragment of possible subtext right into the lyrics. Scuttling through the shadows, a chorus of the rag-clad, downtrodden poor sings, over and over, that "it's all a facade," as though we were too stupid to understand the hypocrisy of Victorian morals. Other mammoth themes--the war between good and evil, the rivalry between the public and the private self, the conflict between end and means--get thrust forward just as blatantly.

This heavy-handed candor deprives us of the opportunity to think through the issues ourselves. With no need to interpret the production, and thus to participate in it, spectators are reduced to voyeurs. Stevenson's story, vague about the struggle for Jekyll's soul, invites us to see his strife within ourselves. The musical puts the contest center stage: At the evening's climax, Cuccioli repeatedly shifts back and forth from Jekyll to Hyde in a split second, altering his posture (upright for Jekyll, stooping for Hyde), his voice (higher for Jekyll, lower for Hyde), and even his hair (slicked back for Jekyll, unruly for Hyde), synchronous with a pulsing spotlight. The effect is striking, but it narrows the focus to a single man with sensational problems rather than suggesting the world.

An early casualty of Broadway's musical melee was the ebullient Play On! (book by Cheryl L. West), which set Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in 1940s' Harlem, and let its characters express themselves through old favorites by Duke Ellington. Though some scenes had a forced quality, and the connecting story was a threadbare excuse for the songs, the personalities--like the stately composer Duke (Carl Anderson), or the skittish femme fatale Lady Liv (Tonya Pinkins)--were more distinct, more human, and vastly more appealing than anyone treading the boards of Titanic or haunting Jekyll & Hyde. Even the scenic design--a color-saturated Art Deco cityscape had a consistency and logic the other productions lack. Play On! had no pretentions and much cheerfulness--no wonder it closed. When musicals can pontificate about human misfortune, why should they bother to sing and dance?