Bobby Cassell as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. (Photo by Jim Hall)
Now in its second season at the Broward Center’s Amaturo Theater, Slow Burn Theatre Company has grown assured enough to tackle four large-scale musicals, including Titanic, Big River and Aida. All three of those were long-running Broadway hits, the opposite of what the adventuresome company used to consider its mission to be, apparently a bow to more mainstream commercial tastes.
In the past, Slow Burn gravitated towards such damaged goods as its season opener, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, one of the few Disney stage shows that never made it to Broadway.
It first met an audience in Germany some 17 years ago and has gone through many rewrites since, taking the musical further and further away from the 1997 animated feature, into darker territory more akin to the classic Victor Hugo novel. No wonder Disney decided to cut its losses and instead license the show to the Slow Burns of the world, which are eager to plumb such depths and have audiences that craves unconventional fare.
So if you go looking for those adorable sidekick gargoyles – Victor (Charles Kimbrough) and Hugo (Jason Alexander) in the film – you are bound to be disappointed. They have morphed into a chorus of somber priests who help to narrate the whittled-down plot, minus any sign of comic relief.
Quasimodo, the near-deaf, misshapen bell ringer of Notre Dame, remains the central character, raised by the villainous minister of justice Frollo, whose idea of justice is locking the boy away from the world in the cathedral bell tower. Now grown, but still childlike, Quasimodo escapes beyond the church’s confines to the boisterous Festival of Fools outside. There he meets and is quickly smitten with the gypsy girl Esmeralda, who has also drawn the attention of a traditionally handsome soldier, Phoebus. They bond together against Frollo, who threatens to destroy the gypsies’ home as well as Notre Dame cathedral itself. Yikes!
The musical score is supplied by Disney’s chief film composer, Alan Menken, paired with lyricist Stephen Schwartz – the team that would later give us Enchanted. If the songs fail to evoke 15th-century Paris, at least they are fairly pleasant and occasionally hummable.
Some of the best go to Quasimodo, played for maximum empathy and sung with power by Bobby Cassell, who lets us see the outer grotesquely deformed figure as well as the inner soulful man, yearning to be accepted and loved. Cassell, seen earlier in Slow Burn’s Spring Awakening, is a genuine find who shows unexpected range here.
It is no surprise to followers of Slow Burn that company co-founder Matthew Korinko has impressive dramatic and vocal chops as Frollo, playing the man conflicted over his actions rather than a two-dimensional villain. If the principal cast has a weak link, it is Shenise Nunez (Esmeralda), who comes off way too bland for a woman who attracts whoever she meets in an instant.
Vocally, the score is augmented by a sizeable choir seated in the side front boxes – pews? – ready to chime in as required. The always resourceful Sean McClelland provides a stunning, faux-stone Notre Dame set, dominated by a stained glass rose window. All of the design elements are top-notch, notably Becky Montero’s moody and mercurial lighting and Rick Pena’s character-rich costumes.
Disney may have been right about the commercial prospects of this stage adaptation of Hunchback, but fortunately that has not daunted director-choreographer Patrick Fitzwater, who keeps accepting and succeeding with such challenges.
THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, Slow Burn Theatre Company at the Amaturo Theater, Broward Center For The Performing Arts, 201 SW 5th Ave., Fort Lauderdale. Through Sunday, Nov. 6. $25-$60. 954-462-0222.