VUE Weekly Preview
March 2011

Planted beside Gerecke in the empty Shoctor audience during a lunch break from rehearsal—a set of wire-y, spiderlike set pieces guard the stage before them, with the instruments their live band spilling out behind—Christenson's nonchalance belies the immense amount of tinkering and endless revisions he's made with Gerecke and the cast and crew to each shows. Catalyst's perpetual, restless creativity remains unparalleled here or afar. These shows get rave reviews in New York and London, too.

The heat he refers to is unbridled emotional passion, a keystone of Hunchback; if, the pair note, Dr Frankenstein and Poe were "cold" figures, it was in being reactionaries to their worlds. The inhabitants of Victor Hugo's 1831 novel are the opposite: headstrong to their blindspots, but charging ahead with the reckless abadon of young hearts ready to ignite. It's almost operatic in feel, Gerecke notes.

"That was what drew me to it," Christenson says. "It just felt like a new set of challenges, the kind of emotional intensity that these characters are fuelled by, and that is asked of the actors to bring to the piece. And its had its own challenges for us, in terms of trying to develop a musical and visual and textual way of expressing that, that was still in the world of the work that we'd been creating."

"These characters are not measured. They're absolutely driven by their love," Gerecke adds.

The pair had originally considered and then passed over Hunchback and the tale of a dangerous love triangle that emerges in Notre Dame between the deformed bellringer Quasimodo, lovely gypsy Esmeralda and priest Claude Frollo; it's a story with a number of existing adaptations, already. But Christenson felt himself responding, and resisting its pull ultimately seemed to be cheating his own heart.

The production got a boost when they were approached by Citadel artistic director Bob Baker, who commissioned the work without ever seeing a draft. And like Frankenstein and Nevermore, Hunchback enjoyed a workshop run a few weeks ago, up at Fort McMurray's Keyano College facility; since then, they've added in the live band, tinkered with the pieces they saw that fit, and pulled out what doesn't.

"I think there's this temptation with classic works, and dead writers, to treat them with a preciousness," Christenson says. "And they suddenly become very stodgy and old fashioned. And I actually think ..." he pauses. "They were artists in their day. A lot of them were revolutionaries, and they were on the edges, the margins. They were pushing the boundaries all the time. So I often feel that it's important to tap into that spirit in the work, and bring that into today. I'd like to believe that Mary Shelly and Edgar Allen Poe, and now Victor Hugo, would have loved the spirit behind what we're doing, which is trying to keep it fresh, and a little raw. Not a museum piece."

"They're a school requirement," Gerecke adds, of such works' usual place in our consciousness.

"And they're actually filled with dangerous ideas." Christenson finishes, noting that Frankenstein author Mary Shelly lived a life that even today would've caused scandal. "It's the same with Hugo," he continues. "He ended up living in exile for a number of years, because of his political views. When you read the novel, a lot of the stuff he's looking at you go, 'Oh, wow ... that's something people even today, don't really want to look at, or talk about. It definitely explores some of the darker aspects of love and obsession that I don't think come out in most love stories that we see in films and things these days." V

*Photo by Ian Jackson, www.epicphotography. Featuring. Ava Jane Markus, Robert Markus, Molly Flood.

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