NOTRE DAME DE PARIS
Book and lyrics by Luc Plamondon
Music by Richard Cocciante
Based on the novel by Victor Hugo
Directed by Giles Maheu
On Tour, See Official Website
Original French Cast and Original Italian Cast on YouTube
Reviewed by David Spencer
Despite its just-completed two-week run at Lincoln Center, the reason to internet review the 23 year old French musical Notre Dame de Paris—the adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel, better known in English, of course, as The Hunchback of Notre Dame—is because it’s on international tour, with two stops in Canada to go before it returns to Europe…and because the tour is a remount of the original, in French, with subtitles. And the same production with its original cast, pro-shot for French television, and pro-shot again with an Italian cast in that language, is easily accessible and viewable on YouTube. So while you might not get to see it live with the current cast, your curiosity can be well satisfied nonetheless. And even if that’s your only pathway to experiencing the piece, and you won’t be investing the ticket price, you should be able to gauge if it’s worth your investment of time.
So let’s take several key aspects under consideration.
This is a Euro-musical. When the British restaging opened (that one sung in an English translation that was not well regarded, but more on that in a bit), it received a kind of critical flack that made the producer push back with a statement that critics were trying to impose upon it the expectations of a traditional musical instead of taking it on its own terms, as a rock concert with a story.
Well, after a fashion, that’s what most Euro-musicals are, but they expect to be taken more seriously than that; most are delivered as through-sung folk operas with a lot of event and not a lot of subtext. But the plots roll along with various degrees of clarity, the shows sometimes favoring spectacle over sense, and the audiences who’ve kept the hits going enjoy them greatly. Not many have achieved universal success—the novelty of the style wore off as the limits of the storytelling techniques were reached—but a few more have succeeded than we’ve seen in English-speaking countries.
But okay; call it a rock concert with a story. This doesn’t exactly get it off the hook. The story is The Hunchback of Notre Dame. You don’t exactly get to claim a loose structure. At best, that’s an excuse for telling the tale sketchily.
And indeed, what songwriters Luc Plamondon and Richard Cocciante have done is strip away not only subtext, but fine points of irony and suspense. One example of many: Frollo, trying to work his wiles on an imprisoned Esmeralda, accidentally lets slip a remark about the injuries inflicted upon Captain Phoebus—whom Frollo himself stabbed and for whose murder Esmeralda had been arrested. She says, “Injured? That means he’s still alive!” This is of course something she cannot know, because however else justice may be corrupt, that much at least can be proved; which in turn makes Phoebus’ decision not to come forward on her behalf (he has a jealous fiancé) moot. Not to mention that it obliterates her discovery that Phoebus is alive when she sees him, on her way to the gallows—which is when Quasimodo, in what is arguably the story’s most famous scene, swings down from the heights to rescue her and take her up to the cathedral’s bell-tower, where he shouts “SANCTUARY! SANCTUARY!” Or anyway, It’s when he’s supposed to swing down. In this version, that doesn’t happen; though there is some convoluted farting around and at some point he gets her into the church and deposits her into a safe place…which is then easily breached by…But why go on? Basically it seems as if every revision of the storyline away from its most exciting scenes happened because the creative team couldn’t figure out a way to make them happen onstage.
At almost every turn, the story is thus flattened—not to mention characters who have known each other for years filling each other in on their backstories, for no other reason than that, again, the dramatists (I use the term loosely) couldn’t figure out how to dramatize the backstory via inference and conflict.
The staging, for a show self-described as a spectacle, is commensurately flat, even though there’s a good deal of fairly rudimentary Cirque de Soleil swinging and flying (mostly spinning) and some running-around choreography punctuated by backflips and such.
There’s so much more that can be added to the litany of goofiness, but there’s only one thing more you need to know:
The piece has been alive and thriving at regular intervals, worldwide, since 1998. It has its proponents. A dear French-Canadian friend of mine who is completely conscious of how ham-fisted and inept the storytelling is, grew up with it as an early influence, listened to the score often, watched the French video with her best friend many times and considers it a guilty pleasure. And at the performance I attended, there was a fairly full house of folks (some factions of them clearly not native English-speakers) at the airplane-hangar-sized David Koch Theatre at Lincoln Center, who also counted it a pleasure, and didn’t seem too guilty about it.
These weird European pieces from a sensibility that feels no allegiance to the structural neatness of American musical theatre (despite enjoying it and sometimes taking equally weird inspiration from it) are, the successful ones, few and far between. There are a few more than we know, or know well, here in the States (like Elizabeth, about the queen; and Dance of the Vampires, whose Broadway engagement was staked through the heart so quickly that it barely seems a footnote), but those that have taken hold on the world stage cannot be brushed away by calling them out on the basis of received musical theatre principles and literacy. Their success is owed to something cultural, sometimes perhaps nationalistic, that so beggars the understanding of us musical theatre—well, let’s say purists, for lack of a less effete word—that we shouldn’t even try. They are what they are and they survive because they’re wanted.
And if that ain’t SANCTUARY!, I don’t know what is…