(Photo by Ryan Miller/Invision/AP)

NEW YORK (AP) – Every performer has a special routine before hitting the stage. For the last few months, you may have found Deborah Cox singing into a computer.

The actress and singer was on a 25-week national tour with “Jekyll & Hyde,” which meant being apart from her husband and three young children back in Florida.

So before the curtain went up in places like Philadelphia or Dallas, Cox would sing lullabies to her oldest, 9-year-old Isaiah, who would take a computer to bed to hear mommy.

“That was the hardest thing when I made the decision to go out on the road: It would mean not being with them the way I want to,” she says, tearing up. “It was a tough time. Tough time. Tough time. Oh, I’m getting emotional.”

Those pre-curtain check-ins are still necessary, but the grueling road trip is thankfully over. A battle-tested “Jekyll & Hyde” has rolled into Broadway and opens this month at the Marquis Theatre.

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BY NEAL BROVERMAN MARCH 05 2013 5:09 AM ET

Deborah Cox is in North Carolina. She’s been in Durham for a few days and just bounced from California to Texas to Florida to New York to Raleigh, N.C., to D.C., back to Texas, then to Philadelphia, Rhode Island, and now Durham. The Grammy-nominated singer and theater actress is on tour with Jekyll & Hyde, playing a lady of the night in the dark musical, which begins a Broadway run in April. Before getting to New York, Cox needs to finish the show’s tour, which means trekking through Oklahoma, California, Iowa, and finally West Palm Beach, Fla., not far from her home in Miami.

“Life on the road is drama,” Cox says. She’s tired but friendly and engaged. “The pace is really intense. We have to keep up an eight-show-a-week schedule, a Broadway schedule, while we’re traveling. There’s a day off, and the day off is a travel day and you try to get whatever you have to do outside of theater done. It’s very much a juggling act.”

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After multi-platinum recording artist Deborah Cox conquered the R&B and pop charts with hits like “Nobody’s Supposed to Be Here,” she headed to the theater in Elton John and Tim Rice’s Aida. Lately, she’s been treading the boards again on a 25-week tour as Lucy in a revival of Jekyll & Hyde. We checked in with the powerhourse vocalist as the show approached the end of its time on the road in preparation for a limited engagement at Broadway’s Marquis Theatre, where previews are scheduled to begin April 5.
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By Jeffrey James Keyes

Top photo courtesy The Hartman Group; Jekyll & Hyde photos by Smallz & Raskind

Chris Jones
Theater critic
March 15, 2013

The great strength of this show is its score. And in Cox, who is by far the best thing about this “Jekyll & Hyde,” the production has a terrific singer and a sexy, perfectly respectable actress offering a character with that feels fresh enough for the post-Beyonce era but also vulnerable. Cox, who brings out Maroulis’ best stuff when her body is attached to him, will emerge smelling like a rose on Broadway.
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Cox, a singer with nuclear power and a sumptuous tone, turns each of her numbers into a show-stopper.

Playing the brothel worker Lucy Harris, who catches the innocent attention of Jekyll and the more ravenous interest of Hyde, Cox gets to enjoy her own double life on stage — one moment strutting her nasty girl stuff to “Bring on the Men,” another tearing her heart out to “Someone Like You.”

A Broadway veteran of Elton John and Tim Rice’s “Aida,” Cox bathes her character in a melancholy glow, but when the music swells this capable stage actress becomes a rapturous concert queen.

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Los Angeles Times Review

Sitting 12 feet away, a second man watched with intense concentration, eyes fixed on the couple, chin cradled in his palm.

In certain circumstances, this might be some kind of kinky fantasy. But here in a basement rehearsal room at the Pantages Theatre, it was serious show business.

PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures

Director Jeff Calhoun and costars Deborah Cox and Constantine Maroulis were engaged in the theatrical equivalent of a quality control inspection Monday afternoon, a day before their revival of the 1990s musical “Jekyll & Hyde” would open a three-week Los Angeles run — part of a lengthy touring prelude to a long-planned arrival on Broadway in early April.

Although a touch of kinkiness is part of the “Jekyll & Hyde” recipe, the director and leading players were concentrating on how to manifest the spark of pure human sympathy between Dr. Henry Jekyll and Lucy, a singing prostitute who plies her trade at a disreputable nightclub in Victorian London.

Cox is a pop-R&B singer and former Clive Davis protégée who took her first musical theater plunge in 2004, playing the title role in the Broadway production of “Aida.” Maroulis’ lifelong musical-theater ambitions were helped along by his ride as an “American Idol” contestant in 2005; they came to fruition in 2009 when he was nominated for a Tony Award playing an unsung rocker on the 1980s Sunset Strip heavy-metal club scene in “Rock of Ages.”

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Los Angeles Times

By: Charles Karel Bouley
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Jekyll & Hyde LA Opening Night

CBS4 Critic at Large Greg Moody talked with Cox about the reinvention of “Jekyll and Hyde” and her time in the Grammy spotlight.
Cox is known for her pop, rock and soul styles. She can sing just about anything, and do it with an emotional edge. She’s won all kinds of awards for her work and Grammy nominations. She brings that energy, that style and that edge to the rebirth of “Jekyll and Hyde.”

Cox is part of a show that has been stripped down to its emotional essence and given a rock sensibility that works beautifully with Grammy nominee Frank Wildhorn’s music.

“Frank Wildhorn is a pop song writer, but he also has the flexibility of writing Broadway style tunes as well,” Cox said. “I think with this show in particular; songs like ‘A New Life’ and ‘Someone Like You,’ ‘Sympathy Tenderness,’ are all like melody driven, great, beautifully written, beautifully crafted songs that transcend musical theater.”

It’s the tie to the Grammys that Cox knows well and remembers fondly for the nominations that she received for her album “Destination Moon.”

“It’s really, really gratifying and so amazing when you get that kind of recognition because it makes all the hard work just so much sweeter,” Cox said. “Honestly, just to be nominated, and that’s not a cliché at all, I truly mean that, just to be recognized is amazing.”

With the power she brings to the role of Lucy, and Wildhorn’s music, she may be at the Grammys again, as well as the Tonys, for this re-imagined — revised — and reenergized version of “Jekyll and Hyde.”

“Jekyll and Hyde,” starring Cox and Constantine Maroulis, opens Jan. 29 at the Buell Theater. Get the Moody deal at $50 per ticket in price Level 2 for the shows on Jan. 29, 30 and 31. Use the promo code “Moody” online, on the phone or in person and save money. Call (303) 893-4100 or visit denvercenter.org.

- Greg Moody is CBS4?s Critic At Large. His reports on CBS4 News are featured on the CBSDenver.com Entertainment section.

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Deborah Cox Shines In Reinvention Of ‘Jekyll And Hyde’