Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)
We're proud to commission another original score from Berklee College of Music, under the direction of Professor Sheldon Mirowitz, and to host Berklee Silent Film Orchestra's premiere performance accompanying Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920).
Considered by many to be the first great American horror film, John S. Robertson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde allowed stage legend John Barrymore to deliver his first virtuoso performance on film. Blending historic charm with grim naturalism, this version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one of the more faithful of the many screen adaptations of Stevenson's story (though greatly influenced by T.R. Sullivan's popular stage treatment), recounting a visionary scientist's ill-fated attempts to unleash the human mysteries that dwell beneath the shell of the civilized self.
About the Berklee Silent Film Orchestra
Recipient of a special commendation from the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Berklee Silent Film Orchestra (BSFO) is dedicated to composing new, original scores for silent feature classics, and performing them live-to-picture. Based at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, the world’s only undergraduate degree program in film scoring, the student orchestra composes its new works, and performs as an ensemble, under the leadership of Professor of Film Scoring Sheldon Mirowitz (Outside Providence, Missing in America). The BSFO has scored and performed iconic silent features including F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, Faust, and The Last Laugh, Clarence Badger’s It, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Buster Keaton’s Our Hospitality, E.A. Dupont’s Piccadilly and Varieté, Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera, and Harold Lloyd's The Freshman, all commissioned by the Coolidge Corner Theatre’s Sounds of Silents® program.
