The haughty lady Fleur-de-Lys complains on the one hand that her fiancé is 'carousing with vile women,' but on the other, describes herself as 'worried sick.'

'When one is as beautiful as you, the packaging doesn't matter,' one character tells Esmeralda, as though he were some greasy marketing executive. When it comes to that, Whelan has a tin ear. Accuracy is not the issue - medieval Parisians would have spoken an archaic French that even a contemporary francophone would have difficulty understanding - but rather the creation of an anachronism sufficiently impressive that it will allow the audience to suspend disbelief and place themselves in a mythical past. The adaptation of a novel like this, published in 1831 but set in 1482, also requires the invention of its own special language. In practice, this pair find only major melodrama and minor pathos in the story of the hunchbacked bellringer Quasimodo's attempt to rescue the Gypsy Esmeralda from the lecherous archdeacon Frollo. In the program notes, Whelan argues it is a great love story while Garnhum calls it one to which we can all too easily relate, a facile but breathtakingly wrong-headed statement: The whole point of such sweeping stories is that they are not like our own lives. If Hugo's novel, for its part, was ever more than a bodice-ripper, Whelan and Garnhum are keeping that information to themselves - at least on stage. The Scarlet Pimpernel that Garnhum directed for the festival last year was livelier than this leaden affair but also gracelessly melodramatic. Robbing the story of any space to breathe, such adaptations can often make a ripping good yarn appear only silly.

They are still writhing about when attendants wheel King Louis's throne right into their midst as though to say, 'Don't mind us, you just finish up your dying, and we'll get on with the next scene.' It's typical of this In the second act, there is a ludicrous moment when the Gypsies storming the cathedral of Notre Dame are repulsed and lie dying on the stage of the Avon Theatre.

Toward Beauty by Dennis Garnhum