Hunchback

Redmoon’s work in recent years has seemed to dare us to make sense of it, a task that hasn’t always yielded enough of a payoff for our taste. The company’s revisit of Hunchback, first seen upstairs at Steppenwolf in 2000 (before that space was permanently prosceniumized), suggests that Redmoon’s style might be best appreciated when it’s tied to an established property.

We’ve noted before that the company’s self-created spectacles, with elements tacked on and fleshed out by its ensembles, might benefit from a stronger authorial hand. In this adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, it not only has an author, it puts him onstage. Victor Hugo interrupts the proceedings more than once to emphasize novelistic details the company glosses over, though he comes around to the players’ style of storytelling (we can’t help but admire the sneaky, cheeky move of writing Hugo’s endorsement into the script).

Working from the skeleton of a story we already know allows the company a little more room to move; it can play more freely without losing us. And while the story is emotionally well served by the interplay of both masked actor and puppet versions of Quasimodo, Esmeralda, Claude Frollo and Phoebus (the pop-up–book work-in-miniature is particularly charming), the action on chutes-and-ladders bell towers slows the story for spectacle’s sake. But we’re just pleased to see the spectacle’s in service of a discernible, effective story.