Notre-Dame de Paris: Highlights

Notre Dame de Paris is a French-Canadian musical, with music by Richard Cocciante and lyrics by Luc Plamondon, based upon the 1831 novel of the same name by Victor Hugo (who also wrote the original Les Misérables). This concept album was recorded in 1997, before the show's debut in Paris on September 16, 1998. The musical was an immediate hit, enjoyed a seventeen-month run in English in London's West End, and has since been produced throughout France, Italy, Russia, South Korea, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada. A shortened version was performed in Las Vegas in 2000. Selected songs from the show have been translated into Belorussian, Catalan, Czech, German, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and English. The Guinness Book of Records cites it as the musical with the most successful first year in history.

The plot is essentially the same as that of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, a story that has served as the basis for over thirty ballets, operas, films, musicals, and radio serials.

The story, narrated in large part by the character Gringoire, begins in the year 1482, at the celebration of the Festival of Fools in Paris. The tower-dwelling hunchback Quasimodo is being crowned Pope of Fools for the day, owing to his extreme deformity. The beautiful barefoot young gypsy Esmeralda, dancing for handouts in the square, has won the hearts of many Parisian men, among them Quasimodo and his adoptive father, the archdeacon of the cathedral, Claude Frollo. Frollo, a priest, is torn between his lust for the girl and the laws of his faith. Quasimodo is tormented by the mob and tied down in the hot sun. Esmeralda offers him a drink of water, winning the hunchback's heart irretrievably.
Esmeralda establishes a liaison with Phoebus, captain of the king's guard, and jealous Frollo makes an attempt on Phoebus's life. The gypsy, presumed to be guilty of the attempted murder, is sentenced to be hung. Quasimodo rescues her and takes her into the sanctuary of the cathedral. Clopin, leader of the Paris underworld, rallies the gypsies and local criminals to storm the cathedral and recapture Esmeralda. Responding to the chaos in the streets, the king revokes the law of sanctuary and orders his troops to take Esmeralda and destroy her. Quasimodo assumes the mob intends to kill Esmeralda, and manages to drive them off. Frollo betrays them both by delivering Esmeralda into the hands of the royal troops. Esmeralda is hanged. Quasimodo pushes Frollo to his death from the tower of Notre-Dame, then seeks out Esmeralda's body in the common pit of executed criminals. He lies down next to her corpse and dies of starvation. Two years later, excavators find their skeletons locked in a loving embrace.
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