Word: hunchback
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...animation a market that will always expand? Or was the Simba spectacular the apogee of a trend? Or a glorious fluke? Disney's last three fully animated films to hit theaters--Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Hercules, all released after Katzenberg's rancorous departure from Disney and his start-up of DreamWorks--have earned together just a bit more than The Lion King...
...movies, maybe in the entire entertainment industry. The pressure to keep producing the tiniest variations on a winning formula must be severe. So it was brave for the Disney artists to try tiptoeing away from what worked. Pocahontas had soaring melodies to match its do-gooding intentions; The Hunchback of Notre Dame came within two deaths and three cute gargoyles of being the first grownup singing-cartoon romantic tragedy. But these two movies also had an almost toxic serioso content. At times they got so solemn they could have been Broadway musicals in the fashionable I'm-miserable...
Composer Alan Menken, on vacation after the operatic Hunchback score, hasn't delved this deeply into pop pastiche since his 1982 off-Broadway hit, Little Shop of Horrors. The quintet of Muses, like Little Shop's black-thrush trio, tells the story, doing justice to the jaunty R.-and-B. inflections ("and then along came Zeus") of David Zippel's serviceable lyrics. The ballad Go the Distance, as pummeled by Michael Bolton, is the tune you'll hear coming from every radio, music store and elevator this summer...
...moments. Part of the problem lay in that his voice was drowned out every time the orchestra launched into the "curse" motif. And although he made a valiant effort to look appropriately anguished, his arm-waving and facial expression never quite succeeded in evoking the passions of the embittered hunchback...
...better luck overcoming the blast of the orchestra and always looked somewhat out of order when coming onstage. There's a heartrending scene in Act Three, for example, in which the duke's toadies block Rigoletto's entrance to their lord's chambers, kicking the poor hunchback until his angry recriminations collapse into a pitiful plea for the return of his daughter. It's a moment that can move one to tears; yet here it looked so stagey that it failed to resonate...