Hunchback is coming!!!- Page 3

[N2N Nate.]

Posted: 10/26/13 at 1:11pm

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.

[finebydesign]

Posted: 10/28/13 at 2:09pm

I mentioned this scaled down adaptation a while back. It's going to be a Brechtian-style piece. The show won't be a spectacle and costumes may literally be jeans. The only spectacle will come from cirque-de-soleil-like aerialists. Also I mentioned the music will be pretty much stripped down, they really want to profile the work here.

I haven't seen anything other than a proposal but this is not going to be Beauty and the Beast in scale.

[darquegk]

Posted: 10/28/13 at 2:32pm

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.

[JohnyBroadway]

Posted: 10/28/13 at 4:03pm

Perhaps this will be like the festival of fools that was big hit, for a few seasons at Disneyland?

[g.d.e.l.g.i.]

Posted: 10/28/13 at 4:50pm

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

[DeNada]

Posted: 10/28/13 at 4:55pm

The play within a play conceit works - that is, after all, how the film itself is ostensibly presented. I am wary of stripping it back physically or audibly, however; a new book is fine, but who wants to hear that score without the choir and orchestra? Putting everyone in jeans and T-shirts sounds very MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG...

As darque says, it's a Gothic story - the architecture and atmosphere are hugely important to what makes the show memorable. You strip away the melodrama (in a positive sense) and what are you left with? A few circus skills production numbers and some slightly twee character moments?

[Scarywarhol]

Posted: 10/28/13 at 5:00pm

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

[finebydesign]

Posted: 10/28/13 at 5:25pm

See that's the opposite of what they want. This show as it is specced now is way more Peter and the Star Catchers than Beauty or Phantom.

It's funny a lot of posts on here mention how dark it should be etc, but want this crazy Beauty and the Beast-style spectacle. Disney is trying to do dark/atmospheric/compelling /intimate with less this time. Hunchback done non-epic could be epic. Mostly because Hunchback is always done in this grand way and the opposite of that will showcase the work. It's also not a property people are clamoring to see.

[DeNada]

Posted: 10/28/13 at 6:41pm

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?

[Scarywarhol]

Posted: 10/28/13 at 6:47pm

I love Peter/Starcatcher as much as anyone and have since NYTW, I am just skeptical of that kind of storytelling working with this particular story.

At least, in so far as the music is its prime asset and demands a very lush reading.

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 10/28/13 at 6:50pm

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

[Mattbrain]

Posted: 10/28/13 at 7:10pm

^ What? Try to do it as a grandiose epic or scale it down?

[RW3]

Posted: 10/28/13 at 7:22pm

Is this Scott Schwartz's first musical?

[N2N Nate.]

Posted: 10/28/13 at 7:32pm

You are joking about the jeans right?.....right?...

[finebydesign]

Posted: 10/28/13 at 7:45pm

Seriously not joking about the jeans.

Scott Schwartz directed Batboy

[N2N Nate.]

Posted: 10/28/13 at 8:03pm

Fck.

[TheatreKid3]

Posted: 10/28/13 at 10:57pm

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

[JohnyBroadway]

Posted: 10/29/13 at 1:52am

Scott directed the world premiers of Secondhand Lions and Somewhere in time,Regionally, this last summer. As long as Menken's score is beautifully presented, I will be thrilled about this. what's the orchestration gonna be two pianos?

Updated On: 10/29/13 at 01:52 AM

[Mister Matt]

Posted: 10/29/13 at 12:02pm

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.

[ILOHTFAHA (Aida Man)]

Posted: 11/13/13 at 11:30pm

I'm toying with the idea of Sierra Boggess as Esmeralda because it would be a career changing role for her playing a female role that is NOT an ingnue role like Ariel or Christine or even Fantine.

[N2N Nate.]

Posted: 11/16/13 at 7:38pm

Sierra would be all wrong for Esmeralda.

[onedaymore]

Posted: 11/17/13 at 7:11am

Mandy Gonzalez for Esmeralda pls

[darquegk]

Posted: 11/17/13 at 10:27am

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

[onedaymore]

Posted: 11/17/13 at 1:13pm

Dream cast:
Quasimodo: Jeremy Jordan
Esmeralda: Mandy Gonzalez
Claude Frollo: Brian Stokes Mitchell
Captain guy (Can't remember his name lol): Zachary Levi
Clopin: Christian Borle

[ILOHTFAHA (Aida Man)]

Posted: 11/17/13 at 5:51pm

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