I was going to write a very Emo post … instead I listened to David Hasselhoff.

I like musicals. Rather, I like some musicals. My favourites are Phantom of the Opera; Quasimodo; Little Shop of Horrors; Sweeney Todd and Jekyll and Hyde.

All of which have fantastic songs, beautiful music, and all of which feature sinister otherworldly characters lurking in the shadows. Or the hero as I like to think of them.

One of these (Jekyll and Hyde) I’ve not been able to see performed (Hasselhoff, if you’re reading, please bring the show back to London) so all I have to go off is the soundtrack, which I love because it leaves so much of the ending ambiguous.

It’s not much of a spoiler to say that Jekyll dies at the end. What I’m vaguer on is what exactly happened before that. If you listen to the finale it ends with Jekyll’s fiance Emma singing the words

“You’re with me now; where you’ll always be.”

I interpreted this as being that Hyde had killed Emma at some point towards the end and this was their being reunited in the afterlife. And then, as a fantastic example of story being told literally through the music, the closing chords are alternately glorious and sinister and I assumed that, in the stage production, this was matched with the Hoff looking to the audience not with his mild-mannered Jekyll face, but the sinister grin of Hyde.

I loved the idea of the redemption of the anti-hero (because Jekyll and Hyde truly are the same person) combined with the far more subversive notion that Hyde ends up in heaven, completely destroying any sense of moral justice in this world or the next, his ultimate victory over, well, everything.