The original French lyrics were written by Luc Plamondon and the English lyrics are by Will Jennings (and it really looks like French translated in English by a bad student with a good dictionary).

The booklet contains a big color picture of Celine Dion with her hair in the wind, without any interest, one small ID-like color picture of each of the authors, a half-page rough synopsis, one page describing all the characters. About the pictures, there is at least one medium color picture of each main character, and pictures of them on stage as lyrics bacground. Quite funnily, Natasha St-Pierre and Steve Balsamo have their picture, but not on stage, as Tina Arena (who has a full page picture of her face), maybe because the background pictures used are from the French production. It probably would have been too expensive to make pictures of the English version of the show.

This recording is quite interesting for me as it is one of the rare musicals that have been translated from French to English and that reaches the United States after a travel that passed by London and Canada. Quite interestingly too, I've found some of my criticisms in Max O. Preoo's last Show Music article: the fact that it was more a pop show than a real musical theatre piece etc. I won't add to his or my previous remarks that you'll find in the French recordings pages. So here we are with an English version of this musical. First of all, the way stars are presented in the booklet and the way Celine Dion's presence is emphasized on the jewel box is a proof of that 'stars singing' musical style that can at times look like a lifeless revue of other shows. But I'll quickly come to the vocal performances as I've not heard much differences between the music of the French productions and this one. Fist of all, you'll guess that I was happy Helene Segara has disappeared from the cast. Tina Arena seems to me a much better choice. Even though everybody does not agree on her vocal quality, I like the clean, light flow of her voice, which is very different from Helene forced flow. On the other hand, she's probably not wild enough, but as her voice is better I prefer her in the role. Even if he's far from being humble, Patrick Fiori could have been a good choice for the English version too, but maybe his very rough accent made it impossible for him to correctly sing in English (that's only a pure supposition). Instead of him, here comes Steve Balsamo. I had recently heard him on Decca Broadway's recent recording of London Jesus-Christ Superstar, and he had impressed me. But here, he seems to restrain himself to what Patrick Fiori used to do when singing Phoebus, and does not give the vocal power and personality I had appreciated so much in JCS. Steve, here, is just a clone of Fiori, nothing more, nothing less. Too bad. The last replacement is of the young Fleur-de-Lys (Julie Zenati in the French version) by Natasha St-Pierre. Julie was young and fresh, maybe sounding too much innocent, but vicious enough to be convincing. Natasha brings more vocal power, less freshness, but real female domination over Phoebus hormones. This is an interesting replacement, that changes the way the character is sung without being a "better way". It is an alternative and I think that Julie could possibly have made it in the English version. The other performers, all part of the original French productions have performances very similar to what they used to do then. Probably even too much which makes it rather uninteresting to hear them in that version when you've heard them singing in French. Nothing added, nothing withdrawn.

I must add that I consider that the translation of the original lyrics to English is very bad (it's not a false translation, but a bad one). And it's possibly because of that that the original performers can stay so close to what they used to do in the French version: the text is so close to the French text that they nearly only have to change their lips movements. I think other authors could have made something much much better than this word for word translation that lacks what can make English language so poetic when well used. And that's probably because English singers as Steve Balsamo are not really at ease with such strange lyrics and so do not offer what they could with correct ones. Another remark is that it's possible that the original French lyrics are too bad to be correctly translated in something appropriate for musical theatre: they are lyrics for standalone pop-style songs which makes us come back to the beginning of this 'review': is Notre-Dame de Paris a musical or a pop show ?. The future will at least tell us if it will please the North American public.