Playwright Jeffrey Hatcher and the City Theatre have rescued melodrama from politics and put it back on the stage where it belongs.

Hatcher, who shapes his plays from such well-worked material as the life of Frank Lloyd Wright ("Worksong"), Restoration England ("Compleat Female Stage Beauty") and the sentimental sports writer Mitch Albom ("Tuesdays With Morrie"), has resuscitated that old favorite of Victorian horrors, Robert Louis Stevenson's "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," for the stage.

He streamlines the title to "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and although he then complicates Stevenson's straightforward story with some Psychology 101, the play remains an old-fashioned piece of lurid sex and violence, just like our ancestors would appreciate, it being a break from the real sex and violence in their 19th-century lives.

What makes this production at City's South Side theater click is the brawny Kelly Boulware as the embodiment of evil-Mr. Hyde. His presence fills the oddly sinister landscape of set designer Tony Ferrieri, a murky 1880s London represented by a fractured version of Monet's painting, "Waterloo Bridge." Of course, there's fog. It was drifting into the seats before the show and continued to hang around throughout this more than two-hour play.

With a head of leonine locks and pants that seemed to be painted on, Boulware swaggers and menaces like a true matinee villain. His perversions, which include burning prostitutes with acid and carving their backs with his knife, are shown in silhouette, but even so, this "Jekyll and Hyde" is one of the most violent productions seen here in ages.

Director Tracy Brigden, City's artistic director, continues to demonstrate the fine knack for crowd control she showed earlier this year in "The Seafarer." Four of the six actors, including Boulware, play several roles. Brigden choreographed the complicated comings and goings smoothly and no beats were skipped.

Melinda Helfrich, compelling in Quantum's production of the Lorca play, "Yerma," is the conflicted chambermaid Elizabeth, a lass willing to embrace the sicko side of Hyde, warts, hydrocholric acid and all with a passion that dramatically was fierce, but, in reality, implausible.

Hatcher's obvious message is that we're neither hero nor villain, but parts of both, thrown in our faces by creating multiple Hydes who pop up now and then.

City Theatre invested a good deal of money and artistry in dressing up this unoriginal theme, from the physical aspects of set design, costumes, lighting and even a chemistry set that makes the bubbling potion for Jekyll's transformation.

After a drawn-out first act too filled with tedious narrative descriptions, the second act is charged with energy and a sense of doom.

The rest of cast -- the pale, tremulous David Whalen as Jekyll, Daniel Krell and Sheila McKenna, solidly playing several roles, and the omnipresent stage presence of Martin Giles, using the same British accent from "The History Boys" and "What the Butler Saw" -- responded to Bridgen's direction with a professional polish.

It's all in good fun, despite the occasional gore, a lightweight parody of good and evil, wearing the elegant evening dress of the City Theatre's high production values.

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