Classic tale gets haunting, twisted treatment

Silent, maniacal-looking figures glide onto the Shoctor stage, cutting through swaths of bold lighting. In the darkened background, a visible four-piece band pulses with ominous thunder.

A chill slides down the spine as Catalyst Theatre’s turbulent cautionary tale Hunchback picks up momentum, proving once more that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Commissioned by the Citadel Theatre, Hunchback opened to standing ovations on Thursday and will continue to celebrate its world premiere until Sunday, March 27.

Once more the innovative team of former St. Albert director Jonathan Christenson and designer Bretta Gerecke has fashioned a vision that is loaded with striking visual imagery, punchy theatricality and shock-value elegance. Picture The Matrix meets Edward Scissorhands wrapped in hoops, hats, crazy wigs, tattered fabric and feathers.

Adapted from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, this stylized musical is at once grotesque, dark and whimsical, a powerful communication of obsessive love swirling in violence and eroticism. It explores a fixation to control the uncontrollable — people and emotions. Ultimately the obsession ends in catastrophe.

While many adaptations, Disney included, have made Quasimodo a main focus, Christenson, who not only conceived the idea but also wrote the songs, has shifted the attention to Claude Frollo, a celibate but tortured priest who lusts for the captivating gypsy Esmeralda.

As in any good Greek tragedy, the three open themselves up to love, but it is an emotion built on desperation. Not only does the love fail to bloom, its insanity destroys the triangle as they are propelled to their final macabre destiny.

The beautifully conceived and interlocking performances create a relationship that is both fascinating and repugnant. Scott Walters’ Frollo morphs from a decent man of Christian values to a fiend so controlled by lust that he turns into a stonehearted homicidal maniac. You just love to hate his character, especially when he forces Esmeralda to choose between him and death.

On the other hand, Ava Jane Markus’ Esmeralda is a compassionate soul looking for romance. Unfortunately she falls for the juiced up ladies’ man Captain Phoebus de Chateaupers (Ryan Reid) who only uses her for sack time.

Perhaps the most striking performance is Ron Pederson’s soul-eyed Quasimodo, a hunchback barely able to speak who wears his heart on his sleeve. One of the most wrenching scenes is where he is falsely accused of kidnapping Esmeralda and lashed.

In the space of a few minutes, Pederson guides us through profound confusion, pain and agony, aloneness and slavish gratitude as Esmeralda approaches him with a flask of water. And it is in this scene we see that the only one not a monster is Quasimodo.

Hunchback’s provocative vision will not appeal to all, but the product questions our moral certainties, something great theatre is charged with.