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Hunchback scores as Gothic melodrama

? Hunchback, conceived by Jonathan Christenson and Bretta Gerecke, a Catalyst Theatre production at the Vancouver Playhouse to March 10. Box office: 604-873-3311

I came to Hunchback already biased in its favour.

As a young boy, my awareness of "acting" as a craft was sparked by a single performance: Charles Laughton as Quasimodo in the 1939 movie, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Also, Catalyst Theatre's 2010 production of Nevermore is in my all-time top-10 favourite theatre productions. So I was already a fan of writer/ director/composer Jonathan Christenson and designer Bretta Gerecke's work. Yet despite eager anticipation, at intermission I was still waiting to be drawn inside Catalyst's re-imagination of Victor Hugo's sprawling melodrama.

Then I remembered that I'd had exactly the same experience at Nevermore: cool at intermission, standing ovation at the end. So, would Catalyst pull off the same feat with Hunchback, finding the humanity of the story and make me care about its operatic-scale characters?

Christenson and Gerecke have conceived a relatively simple design of tripod arches that evoke the Gothic architecture of Notre Dame cathedral. They then use a huge amount of side lighting to throw focus on the actors or carefully staged, larger-than-life moments. Sometimes they are intimate portraits, stills from a silent German expressionist film; at others, they are classic melodramatic "reveals" - like the entrance of Phoebus as a golden captain and his warhorse, or justice as a grotesque, puffed-up balloon figure manipulated by others.

In fact, this issue of control is central to Hunchback: control of others, control by others and self-control - or the lack of it - are the forces that disrupt the love story that narrator Pierre Gringoire tells us will go terribly wrong. Gerecke emphasizes control elements in her steam-punk designs too: Quasimodo's famous hunched back is depicted by a twisted exoskeleton cinched to actor Ron Perderson's body; Scott Walters' Frollo, Quasimodo's surrogate father and the cathedral's arch-deacon who lusts after the beautiful gypsy dancer Esmeralda, adds inches to his authoritarian image atop goth platform boots, but his robe contains hoops that circumscribe him.

Absent in the overlong first act were the bells that have made Quasimodo deaf, but in the best scene of the more intimate second act they descend like illuminated light shades. Their fragility and beauty is at odds with the expectation of huge bronze castings but are beautiful realization of Quasimodo's line: "the bells are my birds, this tower is their cage and they sing to me" - another contrast between freedom and entrapment, just as Esmeralda and Quasimodo are trapped within the same tower.

Some of the voices in this small ensemble cast soar like birds, too. It's the men who make a bigger impression here: Jeremy Baumung, the narrator, and Scott Walters as Frollo are confident singers who carry much of the score, while the countertenor of Robert Markus is as pure as Our Lady of Paris.

Christenson's music, prerecorded here, offers classical motifs, but is, ultimately, a synth-heavy rock opera. The musical's dramatic highlights come out of self-discovery: "I'm not the man I hoped to be," wails Frollo in anguish; "I'm not a monster/I'm a man," declaims Quasimodo. But its musical peak is a rock anthem that's so stirring, it's astonishing that it - and Hunchback - is performed by only eight actors. "All that I want/All that I need,/So simple, and yet,/So far from my reach," they cry.

There are so many spectacular moments like this in the show, I feel like a heel for saying I wish it was perfect. But the first act needs trimming and the second act confrontations between Frollo and Esmeralda are two-dimensional. That said, this production is still worth seeing.

mmillerchip@nsnews.com