Hunchback

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST Puppets enact the heartbreak of Hugo stale.

Children can be seen in the audience for Hunchback, but for the most part they cannot be heard. Are they rapt, or just scared out of their wits? Either way, the silence of the kids testifies to the effectiveness of Redmoon Theater’s wondrously inventive adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel, about a deformed bell ringer and the gypsy girl he loves. Most of the story is told wordlessly, on three scales: through half-size marionettes, actors with masks, and a lurching double-size puppet at the end. But Hugo himself (Jeremy Sher) makes occasional appearances to make sure that the audience does not forget the stench and moral rot of 15th-century Paris: “A city of spit, a city of sickness, death, madness, torture and despair.”

This is a long way from Disney’s animated musical, but Redmoon’s Jim Lasko and the brave New Victory have implicit faith in what children can see in the dark. There is room here for loveliness and humor, and even adventurous chase scenes, excitingly rendered on a matrix of seesawing ladders. But the show is also full of torture, murder and lust; as in Hugo’s novel, it ends in a cellar of rotting corpses beneath the gallows of Montfaucon. (“Thousands were hanged on its gibbet, the wood of which was rotten with centuries of blood.”) Hunchback matches the description that its Hugo offers of Parisian architecture: “What made its beauty so distinctive is that it did not exclude the ugliness.”