Jeffrey Hatcher's stage adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde feels ripe with potential ...

Potential that never quite breaks free in the Tacoma Little Theatre staging.

Most distinctive (and when re-adapting a long-recognized and oft-staged work like Jekyll & Hyde, it pays to be distinctive) is the portrayal of Hyde. Rather than cast a single actor as Dr. Jekyll's darker half, Tacoma Little Theatre employs four actors (each also playing an assortment of supporting roles) donning the cape and hat of Hyde at various intervals. The flip-flopping is seemingly reliant on which actors need to be on stage for other purposes.

There is opportunity here. Opportunity for four different actors to play four different Hydes. Four different facets of the many layers of darkness that afflict mankind. Because at its core, Jekyll & Hyde is not a story about light and dark, or good and evil. It is about gray and dark. Human and evil.

Micheal O'Hara's Henry Jekyll is hardly a paragon of virtue, a polar opposite of Hyde. Instead, he is a man. Nominally a good man, well-liked and principled, morally outraged by a colleague's perceived corpse desecration, but not without his flaws. He is an ordinary man seeking to extract the evil of his personality, who only succeeds in eliminating the good.

So the window is there to present a kaleidoscope of Hyde. To my dismay, though, however capable the supporting cast was at playing the assortment of side characters (one flailing attempt at a Scottish accent aside), Hyde remained relatively static across four performances. He is brutish and vicious, but lacks the stage time to really provide ample analysis of the darkness inherent in man.

Jekyll's motivations are difficult to determine; at times he seems to believe the base instincts of man are the natural order and should run free (or at least freer than we allow). At other times he appears ready to strike them from his mind altogether. In this, and in the relationships that drive each character rather rapidly through the plot, I wish there had been more time: a few more scenes, here and there, to get to know the characters. Why is Nicole Lockett's Elizabeth drawn to Hyde? Why can Jekyll not resist the call of his potions when he knows the consequences? There are questions that lack answers.

Leslie Foley's piano score is a highlight of the production. I would love to see live music cropping up in more non-musicals at the community level. Foley also contributed fiddle playing to Lakewood Playhouse's Grapes of Wrath last season. Creepy piano music is not quite enough, though, to lend a genuine Halloween air to TLT's October offering, and the show ultimately disappoints, if only because it feels like so much more could have been done.

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
Through Nov. 6, Friday-Saturday 7:30 p.m., Sunday 2 p.m., $14.50-$24.50, Tacoma Little Theatre, 210 North I St., Tacoma, 253.272.2281