thoughts on the hunchback of notre dame musical in melbourne (technically an amateur production but the production quality was excellent... better than the lotr musical, bless it).
to be upfront, i'm coming at this from a fairly clean slate. i saw the movie a few years ago. i am not familiar with the musical or its history beyond the first song, a couple of bootleg clips and a quick skim of wikipedia, so i won't pick up any nonreplica changes. i haven't read the book either.
we all knew this but the music was so so so good. there was the full 32-person choir and i see why the creators insisted they had to be there on broadway. really powerful stuff.
some stunning visuals and general stagecraft in this show. they pulled off a LOT of misdirection and every time i was like [frollo witchcraft.gif]
genuinely this was my fave version of hellfire. it absolutely captured the drama from the movie - esmeralda dancing in front of the stained glass window, the ensemble hood-up to form a corridor around frollo, pulling off white robes to reveal blood red... that was good shit right there
overall great performances, with quasi (jackson howe) and frollo (mike gardiner) as major standouts. as they should be, i suppose.
i actually really liked what they did with frollo's backstory. a) it just makes more sense to have him as a residing religious leader and b) i've seen arguments that jehan's story makes him sympathetic but i personally didn't get that impression at all. he may not be totally disney-villain cold but they still make it very clear that he's despicable and i think he felt more real for that.
i've been going back-and-forth with how i feel about the tone of the show, and also how much i should consider it as a mashup of the book and movie vs its own thing. thinking about things like quasi very purposely killing frollo and just the overall misery of the ending. also i was taken a bit aback by clopin at the end being like lol! no morals here! even though there obviously is... i guess i don't think it's as successful as les mis or hadestown with balancing bleakness against hope, it swings from one side to another more and then doesn't fully stick the final jump back to hope.
it's so interesting that "who is the monster and who is the man" is changed to "what makes a monster and what makes a man" - actions, not a single state of being - and the answers are a lot more complicated to fit a more complicated question. like how quasi's first lie is very much a good thing.
phoebus had a very hard switch from womaniser to sweetie which didn't quite convince me of the love story, and i think his sense of duty got lost in the shuffle which additionally means his choice at the end of act 1 is less impactful. part of this might be writing issues, but i also think esmeralda didn't seem enough into him - some things that maybe should have been playful and flirtatious didn't come across that way. so while phoebus' actor nailed the comedy and portrayed his later tender side very well, in between it felt like he was fuckboying too close to the sun.
made of stone felt like it should have been earlier considering he goes through all that transformative anguish just to immediately undo it in the next song. in general i felt this was the most significant pacing/ordering issue. the king scene also felt really random. but the show was overall not too bad in this regard.
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