EDMONTON - At the outset of Hunchback, a company assembles in the lurid shadows of the gothic arches that are the set, the presiding idea and the emotional upward thrust of a breathless and audacious evening of theatre. A flamboyant figure emerges, to introduce his troupe and his subject. “Love!” cries Gringoire (Jeremy Baumung), our narrator. “Love gone terribly wrong. In Paris, la ville de l’amour!”

After that, Catalyst’s latest, biggest original creation by Jonathan Christenson (writer, director, composer) and Bretta Gerecke (designer) propels itself off the (many) pages of Victor Hugo’s monumental 1831 novel and onto the Citadel mainstage with a startling combination of physical, visual and aural invention, and counterpoint of presentational pizzazz and dramatic intensity.

It’s a theatrical engine with its own custom-blended high-test fuel — Gerecke’s extravagantly stylized costumes and lighting, Laura Krewski’s character-defining choreography, Christenson’s rhythmic text and his inventive stagecraft. Ah, and his music (with Wade Staples’s sound design) that veers wildly between austere classical motifs, the juicier operatic impulses of the Les Miz and Phantom rock/opera hybrids with their throbbing confessionals, and most unexpectedly, out-and-out pop pastiche.

When you see La Esmeralda (Ava Jane Markus), the Gypsy dancing girl who attracts a priest to his doom and hers, deliver a breathy, hair-tossingly come-hither song-and-dance — “Make/ me/ yours/ I’m/ in/ complete/ without/ a/ boy” — you’re watching a production number with playful pop bona fides, complete with fake seduction and hints about the nature of stardom. There’s even a rousing pop anthem finale (“all that I want; all that I need ...”) that proves Hunchback isn’t afraid to be catchy, in a pop/populist way.

Christenson and Gerecke have always been obsessed with obsession. With Frankenstein, they reimagined the horror of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster as the obsessive creator defeated by his own human limitations. With Nevermore, they explored the artist Edgar Allan Poe, obsessed in his work with realizing morbid impulses of his own life. Maybe it was only a matter of time till they got their mitts on Hugo. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is, at heart, a grandly conceived melodrama of love as fatal obsession — a priest tormented into damnation by obsessive love for Esmeralda; a freakish outcast (Ron Pederson) redeemed, and doomed, by his pure obsessive love for the beautiful Gypsy; Esmeralda obsessed by the cad soldier Phoebus; an old woman (Lorretta Bailey) doomed to mad hatred by love for a lost child.

Many have wrestled in opera and musical theatre with Hugo’s epic. And many have found themselves drowning in pathos instead of tragedy, beached by sentimentality: the repertoire is littered with the bloated corpses. Hunchback is, in a more familiar way than its Catalyst predecessors, a “musical,” with an onstage band (directed by Don Horsburgh). But Christenson and Gerecke have distinguished themselves by wrapping their theatrical wits around Hugo’s variegated tapestry, with its visions of happiness, its fleeting dreams of light, and its nightmare free-falls into darkness. There are moments of brutality and also of wonder, at the mysterious human capacity for self-destruction.

What the performances express is the huge burden of the self. As Ron Pederson reveals so heartbreakingly, Quasimodo, the hunchback with the misshapen spine he wears on his back, literally staggers, all angles askew, under the weight of it. Similarly, Scott Walters as Frollo the priest, is amazed, appalled and murderously enraged to find himself caged and tortured, by his own human impulses. Gerecke’s dazzling originality as a designer reveals itself in grotesque body parts, giant anklets and cummerbunds, boots that are giant outcroppings, “gothic” in both the 15th and 21st century senses.

Pederson, Walters, and Markus are unfailingly eloquent. There’s a gripping scene in which Frollo risks all to explain his obsession to its object. And a magical one where Esmeralda bonds with the hunchback, as he reveals his love of beauty. Indeed, all the actors create a gallery of vivid characters, for whom Christenson creates moments of quintessential emotional force: Bailey as an aggrieved mother, Ryan Reid as the preening buffoon, the lantern-lit pageantry of mobs.

The evening is full of surprises. Every once in a while comes a scene where the theatrical extravagance oversells itself. For me, the giant spectre of grotesquely distorted justice is one. The fate of Esmeralda unfolds in a final image that doesn’t quite hit its mark. But Catalyst Theatre always tinkers. And the narrative already has a compelling momentum to it.

It’s the richest work yet from this treasure of a company.

Theatre writer Liz Nicholls has returned from vacation to review Hunchback, which continues to March 27.

-- THEATRE REVIEW

Hunchback

Theatre: Catalyst

Created by: Jonathan Christenson and Bretta Gerecke

Directed by: Jonathan Christenson

Starring: Ron Pederson, Scott Walters, Ava Jane Markus, Jeremy Baumung, Lorretta Bailey, Ryan Reid, Robert Markus, Molly Flood

Where: Citadel Shoctor Theatre

Running: through March 27

Tickets: 780-425-1820 or citadeltheatre.com