The Hunchback of Notre Dame Bailiwick Repertory
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The best musicals are the result of creative partnerships. It took Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II and director Rouben Mamoulian and choreographer Agnes De Mille to transform Lynn Riggs’s play Green Grow the Lilacs into Oklahoma! My Fair Lady was the brainchild of Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe, Moss Hart, and George Bernard Shaw (not to mention Ovid). Sondheim may get cultish adulation for his work, but he makes a point of working with great directors, talented choreographers, and writers who know how to tell a story.
That’s the problem with Dennis DeYoung’s musical version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the classic 1831 novel by Victor Hugo about doomed love in 15th-century Paris. A gifted songwriter, former Styx front man DeYoung has packed his adaptation with power ballads and soaring anthems. But he desperately needs a stronger book to set the scene for each song and give the characters context.
Director David Zak has given this potentially powerful but problematic material as good a production as one might reasonably expect. George Andrew Wolff communicates both the likable and freakish sides of Quasimodo. And even if Jeremy Rill’s Frollo never convinces us that he finds Esmerelda attractive enough to kill for, Tretta succeeds in making her both a beautiful damsel in distress and a strong, independent woman.
