Skylight's "Hunchback of Notre Dame" is a Huge Take on the Classic Story
Photo by Mark Frohna.
There is nothing small about Skylight Music Theatre’s season finale production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, written and composed by former Styx star Dennis DeYoung and directed by Skylight’s Artistic Director Michael Unger. In fact every bit of it is enormous, from the huge set and the monstrosity of the villains, to the outsized emotion that fuels the non-stop power-ballads. The oft-told tale of the deformed bell-ringer who lives in the famed Paris cathedral and falls in love with Esmerelda, a Roma dancing girl, has been both simplified and magnified here, in a musical that is as ambitious as Les Miserables and sounds like a cross between Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Jesus Christ Superstar and a big-hair stadium concert of the 1980s.
Although DeYoung’s version focuses on the perversion and all-consuming lust of the Monseigneur Claude Frollo (a tortured but maniacal Kevin Anderson), the star of this show is undeniably its title character Quasimodo, portrayed by the gifted operatic tenor Ben Gulley. It is only when he transforms from the deaf-mute, misshapen outcast to a tender soul revealing his inner beauty in full, glorious song that the music and the story really attain their lofty goals.
Photo by Mark Frohna.
The first gigantic element of the musical that audiences will be awed by is the huge set, designed by Adam Koch for a 2016 production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame done in Maine. With wooden church doors that rise from the stage floor of the Cabot Theater all the way up to the fly space, the scale of the setting is immense. Augmented with gargantuan bells of the cathedral, two multi-story, wooden multi-functional set pieces, and a raked wooden platform, the set unfortunately crowds the stage and dwarfs the actors. Uneven choreography by Lisa Shriver is frequently fighting with the space allotted to it. Even a drop recreating Notre Dame’s famed stained glass window is as visually overwhelming as it is stunning.
Photo by Mark Frohna.
The next outsized component of the musical is the characters themselves. Anderson is positively demonic as the church leader led astray by his uncontrollable libido. Likewise the fortune teller Mahiette (Janet Metz) is an amalgamation of every exotic Roma dancer, crystal ball gazer, sorceress, and persecuted pickpocket who ever swung a tambourine. On the side of goodness and light, the beautiful Esmerelda (a vocally gifted Alanis Sophia) is pure, naive, moral and so trusting that she cannot see the very clear intentions of the men (both heroes and villains) who think of nothing but deflowering her.
Joey Chelius’s Phoebus, the ultra heroic captain of the guard, is a cardboard, French Dudley Do-Right with sword skills and a hearty appetite for women and wine before heading into battle. His foil, the Roma-hating Gudule, played by Andre Sguerra, channels every impulse into the destruction of Esmerelda and the band of swarthy foreigners that have come to France. A baddie through and through, he looks disturbingly like a real-life masked hacker from Anonymous. And although Quasimodo is presented here as a poetic, ultra-romantic, even philosophical soul, at least his inner self is interesting in contrast to his outward appearance and gives audiences something to discover over the course of the show. The rest of the cast stays in their archetypal lanes before doubling down on the characteristics they wear so obviously on their sleeves.
Photo by Mark Frohna.
Throughout the show, the music is exactly what you expect from the pen and synthesizer of Dennis DeYoung. He stays true to his multi-million dollar sound and under Unger’s direction, the actors perform their ballads of love, longing, hope or misery as if they are onstage in an arena. Even while addressing others onstage, they sing straight out to the last row of seats, hearts turned up to 11, which puts the emphasis on the huge music rather than the story or connection between characters.
The few moments of the show that feel and sound emotionally true belong to Gulley’s Quasimodo. More earnest child than terrifying monster, the hunchback sings “In My Silence,” “Beneath the Moon,” and “Esmerelda,” with unmatched passion and grace. While the rest of the cast sounds like pop stars, Gulley brings his operatic training and deeply sonorous voice to his character’s pleas for love and understanding, and the effect is more stunning than any bell he could ring. In these scenes, the score and the world of the musical seem perfectly scaled. As the only character in The Hunchback of Notre Dame who truly understands love, it is fitting that he is the only one who can elevate the songs, filling them with hope and yearning.