Hunchback is coming!!! — Page 3

Regardless, I am still waiting anxiously for this to come to Broadway. I will probably cry like a baby when the intro to "God help the outcasts" starts, and Esmeralda is in the large cathedral lit only by candles.

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I hate to say it, but it almost seems like Disney is trying to sink this one. They are taking the one thing that people responded to the most about the piece on film- the elaborate, Gothic grandiosity and darkness, and removing it.

^ That's what it sounds like to me. And that is absolutely the wrong way to go, in my opinion.

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Of any I can think of, this score really should be absolutely ear-splitting...

I get that people aren't clamouring to see this on stage outside of ex-kids of the 90s and us weirdos who know the German version. I get the PRINCIPAL of a smaller physical production - you could probably conjure up a beautiful Notre Dame with not very much. I suspect you can even think of ways with an altered book to scale things down.

But this is a score which relies on a choral effect to conjure atmosphere - for Hellfire, for Esmerelda, for Someday, for the vast majority of the show. Made Of Stone relies on Quasimodo wellying out a top C at the end - hell, The Bells of Notre Dame ends on a top C for Clopin and that's the opening! I'm just wary of there being a scaling down of the musical elements in particular.

It's also the talk of jeans for costumes that's weird. Peter has them in appropriate dress; why can't Hunchback?

Didn't Notre Dame de Paris in a large part do that already -- and flopped in the West End.

Is this Scott Schwartz's first musical?

Seriously not joking about the jeans.

Scott Schwartz directed Batboy

If this happens I may spiral into a pit of depression (speaking in hyperbole of course). HUNCHBACK is the best thing they have left - and I say this as one of the biggest self-professed Disney fans on the planet Earth. They CANNOT afford to screw this up. This material demands nothing less than PHANTOM caliber spectacle. Nothing. Less.

If they lose HUNCHBACK they lose the best piece of potential theatre the entire company owns.

Updated On: 10/28/13 at 10:57 PM

Didn't Notre Dame de Paris in a large part do that already -- and flopped in the West End.

Unfortunately, I saw Notre Dame de Paris in London and it was all spectacle, all music, and virtually no book. Unfortunately, the "spectacle" they deployed only made things worse. Like most of the French spectacle musicals, it was basically Eurovision performances strung together and slightly linked thematically. I tried to have fun with it, but the bizarreness of the staging, costumes and choreography muddled with the confusing lack of book just resulted in tedium. I quite literally fell asleep in the second act.

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Sierra would be all wrong for Esmeralda.

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Mandy Gonzales or Naya Rivera of she is ready to do stage work full time.

Captain Guy's name is Pheobus...Jackie Burns or Caroline Bowman for Esmeralda