Kokandy Productions Jekyll & Hyde

A storefront company with a Broadway producer behind it

Kokandy Productions was set up in 2010 by Scot Kokandy, a Chicago producer whose credits include the 2011 Broadway revival of Godspell. The first fully staged musical came in 2012 with The Great American Trailer Park Musical at Theater Wit. The company then moved to the Chopin Theatre at 1543 West Division Street in Wicker Park, where it worked out of the basement studio often enough to be described as a basement company, and built a schedule of two to three staged musicals a year.

The stated aim has stayed narrow and practical: use the heightened reality of musical theatre to tell difficult stories, develop Chicago-based musical theatre artists and new work, and raise the standing of the city's storefront musical scene. Tickets have run as low as 25 dollars.

Derek Van Barham is producing artistic director and runs the company alongside Scot Kokandy. Speaking to Newcity in September 2026, Van Barham argued that a production's budget will never define its potential, and described a post-pandemic shift towards rehearsal rooms that artists actually want to be in. The house line is to control what can be controlled — adapt a show to the room rather than strip it back.

The back catalogue

More than 25 mainstage productions have gone through the company since 2012. The early run included The Last Five Years in 2013, Assassins in 2014 and Little Fish in 2017, alongside Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: The Musical. Sondheim has been a recurring test: Into the Woods and a 2022 Sweeney Todd both drew awards attention, and Sunday in the Park with George followed in 2026.

The other strand is Chicago premieres of titles with a film following — Heathers, a 2023 American Psycho and Amélie among them. That combination, a canonical score played straight next to a cult property given a small, loud staging, is what Kokandy has traded on. Jekyll & Hyde sits in the second camp: a 1990s Frank Wildhorn score with a Leslie Bricusse book and lyrics, dismissed by much of the critical establishment and adored by the people who buy tickets to it.

October 2025: the Chopin run that sold out

Jekyll & Hyde began previews at the Chopin Theatre mainstage on 9 October 2025 and opened on 26 October, the first Chicago staging of the musical in more than fifteen years. It was a deliberate over-reach for the company: a 15-piece orchestra under music director Nick Sula, in a room of roughly 130 seats, with tickets at 45 to 55 dollars.

Sotirios Livaditis designed a set with almost nothing on it beyond a table, leaving the atmosphere to G. Max Maxin IV's lighting, which washed faces in deep reds and cold blues, and to Brenda Didier's choreography. David Moreland played Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde, Ava Lane Stovall played Lucy Harris, Emily McCormick played Emma Carew and Kevin Webb played Gabriel Utterson.

The Chicago Sun-Times review of 28 October 2025 conceded that the material could use a contemporary reboot and concluded that Kokandy made it slay anyway. Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune put the production on his best theatre of 2025 list. The scheduled close of 21 December was pushed back to 10 January 2026, and Van Barham has described audiences standing up mid-show and leaving as though they had got off a roller-coaster. Scot Kokandy had seen the musical on Broadway on 24 July 1998, at eighteen.

Seven awards in one night

On 24 February 2026 Kokandy and Broadway in Chicago announced that the production would return, this time at the Broadway Playhouse at Water Tower Place, as part of a commercial autumn subscription series. It went into that announcement with ten Non-Equity Jeff nominations.

At the 52nd anniversary Non-Equity Jeff Awards, held at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park on 23 March 2026, it converted seven of them: Production – Musical, Ensemble – Musical, Director – Musical for Van Barham, Performer in a Principal Role – Musical for Moreland, Performer in a Supporting Role – Musical for Stovall, Music Direction for Sula and Lighting Design for Maxin. The haul tied Kokandy with Invictus Theatre Company for the most awards of the evening. Accepting, Moreland told the room to do it again, which is roughly what happened.

What the transfer changed

The remount opened at the Broadway Playhouse, 175 East Chestnut Street, on 8 September 2026, with the original principals back in place — Moreland, Stovall, McCormick, Webb and Nathan Calaranan as Sir Danvers. The announced close of 25 October was extended to 8 November before the run was a fortnight old.

The staging grew rather than being rebuilt. Livaditis kept the semicircular Victorian operating-theatre shape and added windows for Maxin's lighting to cut through; Didier's choreography took the extra floor space and the railings. The orchestra remains 15 strong, now a union band, and the cast is still non-Equity — an unusual combination for a downtown commercial house.

The Chicago Tribune gave the transfer three and a half stars and said the cast banished any worry that an off-Loop production could not fill the space, singling out Stovall's voice expanding into the larger room, and noting a happily campy sensibility alongside the power ballads. The Chicago Reader found that the intimacy survived the move better than expected, and credited the team with enjoying the more ridiculous parts of the material without abandoning the tragedy underneath.

Running three shows at once

The 2026 season, announced on 21 December 2025, was built on the back of the Jekyll & Hyde and Amélie runs. It opened with HAIR on the Chopin mainstage, put Sunday in the Park with George into the Chopin Downstairs Studio from 13 August to 1 November 2026, and closes with A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music from 5 November 2026 to 10 January 2027 on the mainstage, with original music and music direction by Sean Ellis and choreography by Breon Arzell — the company's first play with music rather than a musical.

That leaves Kokandy running a Sondheim in a basement studio, a Wildhorn in a commercial theatre off Michigan Avenue and a Burgess adaptation in rehearsal, all in the same autumn. The Jekyll & Hyde transfer is the test of whether a storefront company can hold a subscription house without becoming something other than itself.