Styx's DeYoung shows his stage chops in 'Hunchback'

Dennis DeYoung made his name in the '70s and '80s with the rock band Styx. But these days you are as likely to find DeYoung in a small theater like Chicago's Bailiwick Repertory fine-tuning his new musical version of Victor Hugo's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" (now in previews, it officially opens May 19.)

DeYoung got the idea of writing a rock musical from a touring version of "Jesus Christ Superstar" in the early '90s

"I was playing Pontius Pilate," DeYoung says. "While I was in the show, I thought I should write one of these. So I started looking around for something with drama, something that would suit the way I wrote."

DeYoung thought of Hugo's classic 19th-century novel, about the heroic but physically ugly Quasimodo and his doomed love for Esmeralda.

"I remember seeing it on WGN's 'Family Classics,' the (1939) version with Charles Laughton, and loving it," DeYoung says. "So I read the book and that was it.

"So I did a bunch of demo songs," DeYoung says. "I would go through the book, imagine a scene from it and think, 'OK, what song would go there?' Then I would write the song. Little by little I constructed a show."

The resulting show premiered at the Tennessee Rep in 1997, and some believed the show would go from there to Broadway, but a combination of factors kept it from moving to the next level. Disney was working on their own musical version of the Hugo novel. And DeYoung had to deal with some health-related issues.

"I lost the opportunity," DeYoung says. He put the musical on the shelf and went on with his solo performing and songwriting career.

Enter David Zak of Chicago's Bailiwick Repertory.

"Zak came to one of my shows," DeYoung says, "and then he started calling me about my musical. He called me up four years in a row. The he did 'Jerry Springer: The Opera.' I went to see it and I said, 'Yes.' "

According to DeYoung, the Bailiwick was the perfect venue for reviving interest in this show. The theater was small. And DeYoung trusted Zak as a director.

"I wanted low expectations," DeYoung says. "I wanted to get the thing right. If it's going to succeed, I would like it to succeed on my terms. If it's going to fail, I would like it to go in the same way."

And, ever since, DeYoung has been working on the show -- writing, revising and spending as much time as he can at the Bailiwick putting it all together.

"With a thing like this, it is a living, breathing entity," DeYoung says. "For the 'Hunchback' to really work, it has to be a tragedy. If you rework it into a fairy tale happy ending, it takes all the impact out of it."