Our Lady of Paris travels south

Victor Hugo's classic novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame mesmerizes Rome in live production

Decadent and spectacular, macabre and sensual, diabolic and idealistic: when pop literature meets pop rock, the results can be of this and more.
The adventures of the horrible hunchback Quasimodo, bell-ringer of the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, in an epoch suspended between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and of his doomed love for the beautiful gypsy Esmeralda, has been told again, conquering the hearts of over eight million spectators and of the whole of France.
The bicentennial of the birth of the author, Victor Marie Hugo (1802-1885), the father of French Romanticism, is being celebrated this year, and his fundamental work has been transposed in a musical with lyrics by Canadian Luc Plamondon and music by Riccardo Cocciante. The emphasis has shifted from the Gypsies led by Clopin to other marginals: illegal aliens, clandestine immigrants and the like. What sounds strange is listening to David Zard - the producer who brought to Italy the biggest concerts of the Eighties and Nineties, including the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Madonna, Pink Floyd, and Michael Jackson - talk about plots that seem a cross between Verdi and Puccini.
The musical's soundtrack, from a triumphant premiere in Paris over three years ago, passed the 10 million copies sold mark, and in 2000 the song "Belle" was voted as most beautiful French song of the century. The mayor of Paris gave the prestigious "Medal of the City" to Maestro Cocciante. This is a personal victory for Cocciante (who was born in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh Ville, of an Italian father and French mother), whose "romantic rage" permeates the entire work.
"Cocciante's music," commented Plamondon, "came as a revelation to me. He's a composer with a particularly free inspiration, with a Latin and Mediterranean inclination, which goes beyond simple songs and melodies. He can transform the raw material with a novelistic and spectacular elan".
This is probably the reason behind the incredible success of this musical in Rome's Gran Teatro di Tor di Quinto, in a version translated by Pasquale Panella, Lucio Battisti's final lyric writer. A premiere so packed with VIPs as to resemble Milan's La Scala has been followed by a string of sold-out nights that will run until mid-June.
A crowd of actors has been auditioning for the summer reruns.
It looks like Notre Dame de Paris will become the first-ever Italian musical that will hold for months, if not for years. This already happened in Paris, for 15 months in a row; and in London and Las Vegas, with an English version prepared by Will Jennings, Academy Award winner for the Titanic theme; in Germany and now in Spain as well.
The cast includes seven actors, supported with a "chorus" of 27 dancers.

Publication Date: 2002-06-02
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=1388