Notre Dame de Paris

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Notre Dame de Paris is an enormously popular (as in, played in Korea popular) French-language rock opera, originally starring Quebecois singing sensation Garou. It is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Victor Hugo, better known in English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Tropes used in Notre Dame de Paris include:
  • Adaptation Distillation: Several characters are cut out of the musical, including Frollo's brother Jehan, Esmeralda's mother, and King Louis. The plot doesn't suffer much.
  • All Musicals Are Adaptations
  • Artistic License History: In order to fit the rhyme scheme, Florence changes the city that Gutenberg built his printing press from Mainz to Nuremberg.
  • BSOD Song:
    • Quasimodo's "Danse mon Esmeralda", right after Esmeralda's death. He's witnessed the death of the woman he loves and killed his adoptive father. He's resolved to die holding Esmeralda's dead body, because "dying for you is not dying". Yeah, he's pretty broken.
    • Frollo finally goes insane, complete with Insane Laugh, in "Mon maitre, mon sauveur (My Master My Saviour)".
  • Crowd Song: Whenever Clopin sings, he usually has the rest of the outcasts (ensemble) singing with him ("Les sans-papiers", "La Cour des miracles"). There's also the reprise of "Le temps des cathédrales" at the end.
  • Dark Reprise: "Les sans-papiers (The Refugees)" reappears during the attack on Notre Dame, but this time it's even more serious and Clopin dies in the middle of the song.
  • Distant Duet: Esmeralda and Fleur-de-Lys sing about how much they love Phoebus and how they believe he will love them back forever ("Beau comme le soleil"). Also Esmeralda and Quasimodo in "Les oiseaux qu'on met en cage (The Birds They Put in Cages)"
  • Epic Song: "Le temps des cathédrales" again.
  • Grief Song: "Danse mon Esméralda", as noted in BSOD Song
  • "I Am" Song: "Bohemienne", sung by Esmeralda
  • Ignored Epiphany: "Tu vas me detruire (Your Love Will Kill Me)" is this trope in song form.
  • Looped Lyrics: "Beau comme le soleil" (guess which line is repeated over and over!)
  • Massive Multiplayer Ensemble Number: "Fatalité," the last song of Act 1, has the members of the main cast who are not incapacitated comment on fate.
  • Mr. Exposition: Gringoire in the French musical adaptation. He only interacts with the characters three times and for the rest of the musical his only purpose is to act as a neutral third-party witness to what's going on in the story.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Averted in the musical. The mob of outcasts still gets killed.
  • Sanity Slippage Song: "Tu vas me detruire" for Frollo
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: "Un matin tu dansais (One Bright Morning You Danced)". The instrumental starts out bright and cheerful, as Frollo and Esmeralda sing of the ones they love. Then he tries to blackmail her into having sex with him or face execution. Then he tries to rape her. All the while, the same bright, twinkly tune plays on.
  • Villain Love Song: "Tu vas me detruire" sung by Frollo is kind of an inversion. He's being "seduced" by one of the good guys.