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Chicago Tribune
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Highland Park Players performing Hunchback of Notre Dame musical in concert
Victor Hugo's novel about the deformed bell ringer Quasimodo, who longs for the beautiful Esmeralda, found new life in the 1999 musical, 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' by Alan Menken (music) and Stephen Schwartz (lyrics). Highland Park Players is producing a concert version of that expansive tale, March 28-30, at McGrath Family Performing Arts Center, 3424 Illinois Rd., Wilmette. Connor Giles, who directed last year's stunning production of 'Ragtime in Concert,' directs 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame in Concert.' He is working with a cast of 24, an 18-piece orchestra, and a 33-voice choir. 'The thing that I really love about doing a production in a concert format is that it really forces us to focus on the story itself, focus on the music, the dialogue—and really get to the heart of the story and not rely on all of the bells and whistles that a traditional production might incorporate,' Giles said. The director is a long-time fan of the 'Hunchback' story. 'I am a '90s kid through and through so I grew up on the (1996) Disney movie,' he said. 'It was a film that I absolutely loved as a child. I had not experienced it in quite some time so getting to revisit it — not only the original film but also the musical version onstage in this new way — has been really exciting now as an adult.' For the role of Quasimodo Giles cast Andres DeLeon of Plainfield. 'His vocal ability is so strong,' the director said. 'All of the Quasimodo material is quite difficult and he's really able to execute it at such a high level. That allowed us the opportunity to focus on the character work. He's been such a pleasure to work with.' DeLeon said that his character is experiencing everything for the first time in this show. 'He just wants to be happy,' DeLeon said. 'For a lot of his life, he's had to trust Frollo, his protector.' Quasimodo has to believe that Frollo has his best interests at heart and that his protector is accurately describing the world that exists outside of Quasimodo's tower, the actor indicated. The bellringer has to learn that 'He can make a choice for himself,' DeLeon related. 'He can trust himself.' The biggest challenge of the role for DeLeon is the physicality, he reported. That includes focusing on 'the way he moves' and also the way that the character communicates because he has lost some of his hearing from living in the belltower. DeLeon noted that this is his first principal role — and a large one. He said that he is enjoying the opportunity to create a complete character for himself. To prepare for this part, DeLeon listened to an audiobook of the Victor Hugo novel. He already knew the Disney film. When you watch the movie, the performer said, you realize that Quasimodo 'has to find joy. He has to create his own happiness when he's alone.' Naperville native Rachel Carreras plays Esmeralda. 'Rachel came in and blew us all away with her vocal ability,' Giles said. 'And working through some of the acting portions of her audition, she found a great balance of honoring the source material and still giving us that Disney princess-like character but also finding a lot of strength, a lot of vulnerability, a lot of power in how she's interpreting Esmeralda.' Carreras said that 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' has always been one of her favorite movies and that Esmeralda is her dream role. 'This is my sixth time being called back for this role,' she said. 'I finally get to play it. I am very honored.' The actor described Esmeralda as 'a fighter for the people. She is a justice-seeker. She is kind, she is empathetic, and she's also not afraid to stand up for what she believes in. She's so strong, so resilient. She's an incredible character.' Supporting her people makes her happy, Carreras said. Frollo is her constant obstacle in that goal. Carreras said that she relates strongly to her character because she also 'always wants to love people and meet them where they're at and not have judgment.' Director Giles observed that the story of The Hunchback 'couldn't be more relevant today, even though it takes place many, many, many years ago. It really explores that idea of otherness and what it means to be an 'other.' Everyone will be able to identify with a piece of the story in some way.' Actor Carreras concurred, saying, 'The story could have been written this morning. It is so relevant to what we're going through every day in America. Why is there so much hate just for being different?' Performances of 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame in Concert' are 7:30 p.m. March 28-29 and 2 p.m. March 29-30. Tickets are $33-$48. For reservations, visit
The Guardian
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo review – masterpieces from a man with a heart as big as the Notre Dame
Victor Hugo is the French equivalent of Shakespeare and Dickens. The inventor of Quasimodo and Jean Valjean is so universal that we absorb his myths even if we have never picked up one of his books. Yet how much do most of us know about Hugo himself, behind the books, the films, the musicals? By dedicating an exhibition to this versatile creator's visual art, which started with a few caricatures and developed into sublime and surreal masterpieces, the Royal Academy does something unexpectedly moving. It takes you into the secret heart of a man we tend to think of only as a classic. For instance we discover that Hugo campaigned against the death penalty nearly two centuries ago. His 1854 drawing Ecce Lex (Behold the Law) is a macabre inky portrait of a hanged corpse, part of his doomed campaign to save a condemned murderer called John Tapner. Hugo opposed capital punishment on principle, but a few years later gave permission for this drawing to be made into a print protesting the execution of American anti-slavery activist John Brown. If there was a liberal cause, Hugo threw his huge heart into it. One of the first drawings you encounter in this sensitively curated show is his sketch of the council chamber in the town hall of Thionville in the north-east of France, after it was left in ruins by the invading Prussian army in 1871. Thus, in his late 60s, he added war artist to his vocations of author and campaigner, and recorded the violence of the Franco-Prussian war. In fact, this disaster for France improved his own life. It led to the fall of the dictator Louis Napoleon, whom Hugo had defied, choosing political exile on Guernsey, where he created some of his most haunting art. That was his public life. Hugo's art, however, takes you under his skin, without rules or any audience except himself, absolutely free and dauntingly creative. You can feel the isolation and soul-searching in his 1850 sketch Causeway, which dwells on nothing more than a bleak rocky causeway, perhaps his road to exile. In a drawing beside it he ponders the woody morass of a soaking breakwater in Jersey – the first Channel Island to which he fled. Sketch? Drawing? It's hard to define exactly what these are. Hugo uses a mixture of ink, charcoal, graphite and wash to create his murky paper visions. Sometimes he works on a tiny scale: The Abandoned Park, a silhouette-like image of trees beside a mirroring lake, is just 4.4cm tall and 3.5cm across. The miniaturisation adds to the ghostliness. Yet he can also take drawing to staggering largeness, as in the final depiction of a Guernsey lighthouse with a frail staircase spiralling up to a mystical, hopeful light. At times Hugo is just the writer doodling – using up spare ink, he said – yet his doodles develop. A symmetrical ink stain, like a Rorschach blot, has little faces drawn into it. Other frolics that Hugo called 'taches', or stains, are boldly abstract. Sometimes they form themselves into cosmic visions of planets or unreal landscapes but others remain free and formless. Out of this wild freedom a theme emerges: architecture. This should not be a surprise because after all the real hero of his novel Notre-Dame de Paris is not Quasimodo but Notre-Dame itself – a tottering, unloved old pile of stone when Hugo wrote it. So as well as Dickens, he resembles those Victorian champions of the gothic Ruskin and Pugin. But he's Ruskin on a lot of beaujolais, his imagination drunk on gothic turrets and spires; castles on hilltops or by lakes; fairytale castles and nightmare castles; real ones and dreamed ones. When he visited the town of Vianden, in today's Luxembourg, its castle fascinated him so much he lived in it for three months. He depicts it as shadowy and unreal, like a design for a 30s horror movie. In a second drawing the castle is a floating phantasm above a rickety array of wooden houses: not so much Dracula's castle as Kafka's. When Hugo lived on Guernsey he turned his house into a gothic retreat with a Romantic interior full of fantastical touches. It is evoked here with spooky photographs and a battered mirror whose wooden frame he painted with colourful birds. His fireplace, which he sketched, was emblazoned with a huge H, as if he were a medieval lord. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion We think of French art in the 19th century as a series of 'isms' – Romanticism being defeated by realism giving way to impressionism which inspired post-impressionism. Hugo was a Romantic yet he lived on until 1885, doing the art we see here into old age – and it is timeless, eternally contemporary. Uninterested in artistic fashion – his living came from writing – he followed his own fancy. Like Goya, whom he often resembles, this makes his art speak directly to us. Here is a portrait of an octopus, which he must have seen from the Guernsey rocks, its flailing tentacles making him, and you, wonder if it has a consciousness. Hugo feels the universal pulse of life. He can empathise with medieval outcasts, hanged men and cephalopods. What an artist. What a soul. Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo is at the Royal Academy, London, 21 March to 29 June
