Notre Dame de Puerile

“This is a tale that takes its place. In Paris fair, this year of grace.
Fourteen hundred eighty two. A tale of lust and love so true.
We are the artists of the time, we dream in sculpture dream in rhyme.
For you we bring our world alive, so something will survive.”

Are you Type A, or Type B?

A: Wow, this show might be too intellectual for me!

B: Wow, pretentious and dumb!

If you are Type A, and planning to see Notre Dame de Paris, now playing at Marina Bay Sands, I have good news. Once you make it past the opening number your worries are over.

If you are Type B, boy, have I got bad news for you!

The songs – and this is one of those shows where every word is sung – deliver the three elements Type As prize.

Rhymes: “Here in my home so high, the weather's always nice.
Where summers pass us by, we're safe from winter's ice.
Notre dame de Paris, it's my home in the sky.
Where I think about why, we must live and must die.”

Type A: Ooh, that’s slick!

Type B: Ooh, I’m sick!

Repetition: (The following begins the refrain to The Age of Cathedrals, and while the lyrics as published on the internet show it occurring only three times, I think Gringoire must have sung the song four or five times through, because I heard this line sung at least a dozen times.) “From nowhere came the age of cathedrals.”

Type A: I don’t know what that means, but is sure sounds important.

Type B: I don’t know what that means, because it sounds like gibberish.

Volume: (One of the later repetitions.) “FROM NOWHERE CAME THE AGE OF CATHEDRALS”

Type A: I told you it was important!

Type B: Why is he bellowing that line?

The show is better known for its dancers and its acrobats.  The set is a forty-foot high wall of brownish grey blocks, the wall of the cathedral.  The blocks sometimes open, as windows to the interior.  Quasimodo and the acrobats climb the face during the show.  During the opening number the acrobats, clad in brownish grey sacks emerge from the walls like gargoyles, then slither down to join the similarly clad dancers, who lie about the stage. In the second song they all rise, playing the refugees seeking asylum at Notre Dame.  From whence they came seeking refuge I cannot say, nor can the author. As near as I can tell the song was meant as a nod to our own inhospitable times, with Archbishop Frollo serving as a stand-in for modern conservatives, complete with impending sex scandal. But before he turns them away from the cathedral they dance in front of it in their brownish grey sacks.  It looked like what you’d get if the producers of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe had hired Twyla Tharp to choreograph the Rock People.

A few random comments concerning the second act …

Sitting in front of me was a young man, a very tall, gawky young man.  I was beginning to nod off when his nodding off woke me right up.  Because he was so tall, had he sprawled his arm would have been trailing across East Coast Parkway, while the ICAS would have been stopping his foot at the Woodlands Checkpoint.  To compensate he seems to have learned to curl in on himself. Body parts would begin to fold, then he would start to tip, and then he would jerk awake, only to begin folding other parts, and tipping in a different direction.  It was a bit like Stephen Hawking being tased.  Or like the choreography. 

When they get around to killing Clopin, there is a lighting effect: three large white Xs appear on the wall.  Didn’t anyone tell them this looks like a giant trying to play solitaire ticktacktoe?

They seem to have improvised the curtain call.  First, there was an uncomfortably long pause.  When the lights came up the entire cast was lined up, so perhaps they took roll call.  After bowing, they ran off, then came back on in a more traditional "chorus first, leads last" set of bows.  Then they all lined up and bowed again.  Then Gringoire came forward, and the audience quieted down for him to make his announcement, but instead he began singing, in French, just to remind us that before the show had bad English lyrics it had bad French lyrics.  Then the rest of the cast joined him to finish the song. Then they all bowed again.  Then we all went home.

The sad part is that a very talented cast was wasted.  The seven principals have wonderful voices, and the dancers and acrobats are terrific.  Despite some of the comments made above, many of the dance numbers are spectacular, as for instance the acrobats dressed as Quasimodo doppelgangers swinging from the bells during God You Made the World All Wrong.  The trouble is that while they swing from the bells, Quasimodo is singing:

“God you made the world all wrong, he's so rich; and I'm so poor.
He will make her life a song; he will give her nothing more.”

To which I offer my own version:

“God, you wrote these lyrics wrong, I hate to bitch, but they’re so poor,

You think that rhyming makes a song; you are a talentless whore.”

Giving credit where credit is due, the English lyricist is Will Jennings, the man who put the “ai-yi-yi” and the “ooh-ooh-ooh … ooh-ooh” in “I Will Always Love You.”  If you were looking for a new reason to hate him, Notre Dame de Paris will fill your need.