Speaking of talkinbroadway, Matthew Murray is negative:
"But watching this revival, which Jeff Calhoun is credited as directing and choreographing, I found myself wondering not just what I had ever mildly enjoyed about the original post-Broadway national tour (starring Chuck Wagner, for the record), but how anyone thought this could live off of disc (or, in modern parlance, Spotify). It's not that the story itself, about a desperate Doctor Henry Jekyll injecting himself with a serum that breaks off the evil portion into the sinister Edward Hyde, is not workable. It's that, without involvement of artists of the highest calibre on both sides of the footlights, it barely can even stand up."
His first Tony nomination in a decade, for "Bonnie and Clyde."
And it seemed to me that the routine beating-up of his shows had become tiresome to many, even if in plenty of instances, it was well-deserved.
Plenty of people thought the critics were too hard on the show, specifically because it was his project, and that it closed sooner than it should have.
For a guy whose shows are slaughtered like baby lambs on a regular basis, a Tony nom was a big deal.
"All come together thrilling" would make a great pull quote and go quite nicely with the 90's high-end straight porn vibe of the marketing.
"Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
~ Muhammad Ali
"Unbelievably enough, it is actually easier to watch YouTube clips of Hasselhoff than Jeff Calhoun’s (“Newsies”) re-conceived, garish and extremely unnecessary revival with “American Idol” alumnus Constantine Maroulis and R&B singer Deborah Cox, which is playing a short run on Broadway following a national tour. Calhoun makes many unfortunate choices, including over-stressing the score’s rock elements and using both nauseating video graphics and violent sexual imagery."
Accenting Jekyll & Hyde’s best asset—Wildhorn’s rousing melodies—and hitting the rest at off angles whenever possible, Calhoun and his crew excise much of the original production’s most ostentatious terribleness, leaving mere very-badness in its place. The Act II opener, for instance, is now less ludicrously jaunty, and the big “Confrontation” between our antihero’s two identities is no longer (alas for camp followers!) performed as a hair-flipping coup de théâtre. But the show’s bathetic nadir-climax is intact. “Damn you, Hyde!” Jekyll screams. “Take all your evil deeds and rot in hell!” Hyde retorts: “I’ll see you there, Jekyll!” Godspeed.
"But there are so many puzzlements in this production, which is both over- and under-directed by Jeff Calhoun (whose credits include last season's Disney hit Newsies and Wildhorn flop Bonnie & Clyde). There are Maroulis' mutton chops, which threaten to take over his entire face; the choreography in Cox's bordello-set 'Bring On the Men' — an S&M-inspired, quasi-Cabaret, rope-swirling maypole-esque mess; and the 'Confrontation' between Jekyll and Hyde, the song that's both a solo and a duet. I won't give away the trick, but Maroulis isn't doing the hair-tossing thing that Robert Cuccioli (and Sebastian Bach and Jack Wagner and David Hasselhoff) did in the original production. Calhoun came up with a good idea — which then went terribly, terribly wrong. It is, I think, the curse of Jekyll & Hyde. "