The musical, now running at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse, combines the Disney film’s score with the more adult themes of Victor Hugo’s classic novel.

Michael Arden as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame musical

Jerry Dalia

It'd be challenging to find a moment in a Disney animated movie as harrowing as the "Hellfire" sequence in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The scene follows the morally conflicted Frollo as he tries to reconcile his lustful feelings for Esmeralda with his strong religious convictions. And as Alan Menken, who wrote the score to the movie, put it in an interview with BuzzFeed News, it's simply "one of the boldest, most amazing animated sequences ever."

Though the sexual subtext likely went over the heads of the countless children who've watched the film since its release in 1996, it's long been clear to the creative team behind the new Hunchback of Notre Dame musical, now playing at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse after a successful run in La Jolla, California.

"The obsessions and passions that were in the Disney movie actually were quite startling to me," the musical's book writer Peter Parnell told BuzzFeed News. "I was really knocked out by it."

Menken — who wrote the score with lyricist Stephen Schwartz — Parnell, and the rest of the Hunchback musical team have leaned into the more adult themes in Victor Hugo's classic novel upon which both the animated movie and play are based. It's a slightly different version from the first theatrical adaptation of the Disney film, which ran in Berlin from 1999 to 2002: In the stateside production, for example, the comic relief gargoyles have been cut.

On the U.S. stage, Hunchback's darkness is more palpable than ever. If the Disney movie hinted at Frollo's inappropriate urges for the gypsy Esmeralda, the musical dives into his predatory desire, with the judge explicitly offering to spare her life if she'll sleep with him. Disney, this is not.

"What we felt from the very beginning that we wanted to do is really make this stage adaptation for an adult audience, and really commit to the tone and the complexity and the darkness of Hugo's novel," director Scott Schwartz, son of Stephen, told BuzzFeed News.

And though Schwartz's musical is not being billed as "Disney's Hunchback," it is being produced with the full support of the Disney Theatrical Group, which has been responsible for hits like Aladdin, The Lion King, and Newsies. To their credit, instead of asking the show's creative team to pull back on the adult content, Disney Theatrical has allowed for a much more complex interpretation of the source material, culminating in a show that's more Les Mis than Little Mermaid.

"Hellfire" in Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Walt Disney Motion Pictures

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