Edmonton Journal Preview
March 2011

Bretta Gerecke, the theatre's resident designer and Christenson's creative partner on all Catalyst's fantastically stylized, visually arresting productions, had lobbed the idea of Hunchback his way. "Fate," says Christenson, "is a huge force in the novel. And it really attracted me."

The much-awaited Catalyst Hunchback begins its regular run Thursday on the Citadel mainstage, instead of Catalyst's small black-box warehouse theatre. This isn't the first time these co-conspirators have scavenged literary graves and reassembled what they unearthed into highly original, living theatre. With Frankenstein, they reimagined a mouldering monster of a Gothic novel, famous but largely unread, into a dazzling white nightmare-with-music. With Nevermore, newly back from London, New York and Canada's leading festivals, they recast the haunted, death-centric life of Edgar Allan Poe as one of his own resonantly morbid horror stories.

And now, a dark, tortuous tale of love, treachery and fatal passion, set in medieval Paris — and the most hotly anticipated opening of the Edmonton theatre season.

Others have been lured by Hugo's story of the deformed bell-ringer Quasimodo, the Gypsy girl Esmeralda, the callow soldier she can't help loving, the poet, the monster monk, the mob.... Witness the operas, the ballets, the musicals, the TV and film adaptations that crowd the archive. The 1996 Disney animation includes A Guy Like You, the chin-up musical pep talk to Quasimodo ("a girl does not meet ev'ry day/ you've got a look that's all your own, kid"). It's so all-pervasive that one audience member at Fort McMurray's Keyano Theatre, where Catalyst does its out-of-town tryouts, asked the bemused Christenson why on earth he was adapting a Disney book.

For her part, Gerecke had joined the highly exclusive subset of people who have read all 538 pages of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, cover to cover. Christenson, incidentally, who has consulted four different translations, admits he may have missed a few pages. "Start at chapter six," he advises.

"I loved it!" Gerecke says with her usual exuberance. "I think it's a beautiful, excruciating love story where absolutely nobody gets what they want.... Everyone is so ultimately tormented. It's pure love, (unfettered by reason) .... I can never read the last few pages without crying." Gerecke positively beams, and Christenson joins her. "Pure love! Horrifying!" he says. The opening line of the show, is "love is never stronger than when it's most unreasonable."

What attracted designer Gerecke, too, as an intuitive responder to space and light, was Hugo's "love of the city, the architecture, the neighbourhoods.... As a read it's a beautiful painting," she says. The title bell-ringer, a freakish misfit battered by the world, " has a relationship to the cathedral that's huge," Christenson agrees. Hugo evidently hated many of the English translations of Hunchback because they failed to capture "the personality of the church.... He was grieving the loss of Gothic Paris, a more beautiful city (than its modern replacement). He draws parallels between the complexity of Gothic architecture and the complexity of character relationships. They're full of contradiction, and therein lies their beauty."

The collaborators are struck, even taken aback a little, by the sheer dimensions and emotional scope of everything Hunchback. "It's the biggest thing we've ever done," says Gerecke. "But it's a good fit with our imaginations.... Monumental characters feel familiar to us." Still, they've struggled, more than ever before, "to find a physical vocabulary for the characters," as Christenson puts it. They've challenged themselves to capture, in their signature Catalyst fusion of stage images, text and music, "the driving passion of characters who are all unintentionally masquerading as something they're not," as Gerecke says.

"The body as cage" — which explains Gerecke's giant latticework frock coats and skirts standing around the theatre like crisp, headless, see-through ghosts. How to set in motion the characters who are defined by them? That, smiles the designer, was the "trickiest of transformations."

Size is something the Citadel, our largest theatre, can help with. Hunchback is the first Citadel commission of another Edmonton theatre company. For the first time, Edmonton audiences will see a Catalyst production on the size of stage and venue to which the company regularly tours, like the Barbican in London, the Bluma Appel in Toronto, the New Victory in New York. And among its human resources, the Citadel's brilliant musical director Don Horsburgh provides expertise to looping Christenson's musical score ("rock/pop but with a classical sensibility") for a live onstage band of four.

"It feels epic," says Gerecke. "Is it a fairy tale?" She and Christenson habitually converse in questions, and they listen intensely. "In a way, isn't it an anti-fairy tale?" wonders Christenson. "It breaks down romantic notions of what love is. We believe that love is a transforming experience. Hugo says that it is not necessarily a good, easy, or enjoyable thing. It's beautiful and horrible; it can upend your life! Nevertheless, it's only through the experience of love that we can be fully human."

"Ah, so isn't it more universal than Frankenstein and Nevermore?" wonders Gerecke. Christenson thinks so. "It's huge and intimate, epic and full of quintessential, defining moments of human experience.... But then love is so, well, personal." They laugh.

*Photo by Ian Jackson. www.epicphotogray.ca Featuring the Hunchback Ensemble

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