Broadway’s Julian Decker and Syndee Winters join the Madison cast.
Madison’s Capital City Theatre artistic director Andrew Abrams fell with love with the stage musical The Hunchback of Notre Dame when he saw it at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse in 2015. “The message is so powerful, about love and acceptance,” says Abrams. “Combined with the gorgeous, operatic score, I was completely hooked.”
So The Hunchback was at the top of his list when it came to programming a big production in Overture’s Capitol Theater. “One of the biggest assets — as well as one of the greatest challenges — is the size of the production,” he says. “We have roughly 50 people in the chorus, a 23-piece orchestra, and five leads who will all be onstage for the entire show. But it’s going to be really powerful, seeing the cast fill that stage completely.”
The Hunchback also features some real star power. Julian Decker, who plays Quasimodo, is a Broadway veteran who has portrayed the bell-ringer before. And his love, Esmeralda, will be portrayed by Syndee Winters, fresh from her run on Broadway playing all three of the Schuyler sisters in the mega-hit Hamilton. “We always audition locally first,” Abrams says, “but for this show we also used a casting director in New York to find just the right people.”
The Hunchback of Notre Dame began as a novel by Victor Hugo. In this classic tale, a deformed bell-ringer falls in love with a beautiful gypsy girl, Esmeralda. In 1996, Disney turned it into an animated musical film. While the movie did well, it’s not one of the properties that Mickey Mouse and friends has capitalized on since then. In 2015, the story evolved once again, into a Broadway musical with a new book, and new songs by Alan Menken (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas) and Stephen Schwartz (Godspell, Pippin, Wicked) that build on the original score for the cartoon. The result is a critically acclaimed hybrid — a darker story more true to the novel, with sweeping orchestrations and music that is more complex than a typical Disney soundtrack.
Capital City Theatre’s production will be a staged concert version, which means that costumes and sets will be representational rather than literal, and the chorus will be on risers, with books in hand, throughout the performance. The main characters will have limited choreography along with 16 featured ensemble members, who act as narrators throughout the show.
Director Brian Cowing describes The Hunchback as “a beautifully epic tale of good and evil that asks, ‘What makes a monster and what makes a man?’”
He notes the juxtaposition of the characters of archdeacon Claude Frollo and the hunchback Quasimodo: “One is the moral center of the community and the other is an outcast. The show challenges the audience to decide who the real monster is.”
Editor's Note: An earlier edition of this story gave the wrong date for the release of Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The movie came out in 1996, not 1998.
