Ring out, wild bells! Boldly booming bells ring out from Millburn, NJ, in one of the most be-belled & be-gargoyled visions of medieval Notre Dame ever imagined--even by Victor Hugo, the original imagineer of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame…”
Hugo—who loved the strong contrasts of the hideously grotesque with the miraculously beautiful that are best exemplified by “Beauty & The Beast” and “Hunchback”—would surely be astonished by the great Bourdon bells that are cramming the great wooden belfry of the Paper Mill Playhouse over in far-off New Jersey.
This new incarnation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame is so stunning, so astounding, so altogether wonderful that it should soon move across the Hudson waters to Broadway! Seldom has such an American musical staging achieved such a vivid realization and such serious overtones that its essentially hokey Disney origins fade away…
When “Hunchback of Notre Dame” first appeared as a Disney cartoon feature, it seemed shallow, even silly. Its Allan Menken-inflected score floated along gently down the stream, with no sense of the Carl Orff-ian weight that it now boasts: it is a Mini-“Carmina Burana.” Its gray-clad, come-to-life stone saints chant in a thrumming rhythm that Carl Orff would have loved. In fact, most of Peter Parnell’s book is sung or chanted, rather than narrated: in a minor way, it is through composed—if not quite to the level of Richard Wagner.
As staged by Scott Schwartz and choreographed by Chase Brock—despite its obvious comedic elements & romantic inclinations—it becomes far more than just another conventional Broadway musical.
Patrick Page is Dom Claude, a tormented cleric, unwilling uncle of Quasimodo, the unfortunate Hunchback of Notre Dame, strongly played by Michael Arden. Ciara Renée is the sinuous & enchanting Gypsy Girl, Esmeralda. (She’s even more flamboyant than that other famous Gypsy girl, Carmen.)
This Hunchback of Notre Dame comes to New Jersey from the La Jolla Playhouse in Southern California—not too distant from Disneyland. Perhaps I love the Paper Mill Playhouse Hunchback more than most of New Jerseyans now flocking to Millburn because I saw the first stage version of Hunchback in former East Berlin, after the Wall came tumbling down and a purpose-built theater was positioned at Potsdamer Platz so that Julie Taymor could do her thing.
On one level, it was pure astonishment: a magic box of complicated stage machinery and contrived apparitions. But it was so technically overbuilt that I knew it would never make it to Broadway; no Broadway theater could accommodate those set devices. Compared with the rich, vibrant Paper Mill Playhouse staging, Taymor’s vision was too mechanistic, too sterile.
Award nominations for the magnificent Notre Dame-ian setting of Alexander Dodge: How about that rose window? Beg the Shuberts or the Nederlanders to bring The Hunchback rapidly to The Great White Way!
