Local Boy Sills Comes Back 
to Repeat his Hit 'Pimpernel'

On Wednesday, Douglas Sills will swashbuckle his way through the Broadway musical "The Scarlet Pimpernel" at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco. But Sills isn't just some handsome New York actor breezing through town. In a manner of speaking, he's a local boy coming back as a star.

Sills graduated from San Francisco's American Conservatory Theatre in the mid-'80s, and before he left the Bay Area to pursue greener acting pastures, he performed for several seasons with the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival troupe in John Hinkel Park. While in Berkeley, Sills was Orsino in "Twelfth Night," Cassio in "Othello" and Dr. Caius in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," to name a few.

"That was quite a load," Sills recalls on the phone from the "Pimpernel" tour's first stop, New Haven, Conn. "But what an exciting time. As a young actor, I felt that for the first time, I was being pushed beyond my boundaries. I was exhausted but exhilarated."

Sills, who turns 40 in July, says the training and experience he received in the Bay Area has served him well in regional theaters around the country and especially well on Broadway.

"The Scarlet Pimpernel," Frank Wildhorn's musical based on the French Revolution novel by Baroness Orczy, will go down in Broadway history as one of the most unusual productions of all time.

When the show opened in 1997, Sills, who plays Percy and the mysterious Pimpernel, was really the only thing critics liked. Fans, like those for "Jekyll and Hyde," Wildhorn's previous show, were rabid, forming the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, or "Pimpies" for short. They promoted the show tirelessly, but even with three Tony Award nominations, including a best actor nod for Sills, the show was foundering.

Then a new set of producers entered the picture and invested a bundle of money in the reconstruction of "Pimpernel." Sills remained with the show, but his co-stars were replaced, as were the director and choreographer. Robert Longbottom stepped in to re-direct, re-choreograph and otherwise revitalize the show. "The Scarlet Pimpernel, version 2.0," as it was known, opened almost a year after the original. The new version was a critical and popular hit.

But that's not the end of the "Pimpernel" story. Last year, deciding the Minskoff Theatre was too large, producers decided to downsize the show and move it into the Neil Simon Theatre. Thus "Pimpernel, version 3.0" was born.

The show is no longer playing in New York, but it is on tour for the next two years. Sills is with the tour through San Francisco and Los Angeles.

"I left the show after version 2.0," Sills says in between bites of an all-protein dinner: a bun-less burger and shrimp. "I was just completely exhausted. I think I was in bed for the whole version 3.0 thing."

But the national tour of the show, known as version 4.0 naturally, was able to lure Sills out of bed, at least for a while.

"Doing this show is very physically demanding," he says. "I'm on stage 90 percent of the time, so it's like a musical 'Hamlet.' It's a very physical show with a big sword fight at the end. The only thing more tiring that I've done was the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival."

After working in the show for nearly two years, Sills bowed out, and when he heard about the upcoming tour, he had five words for the producers: "Do not talk to me."

But time away from the role and a great deal of rest gave Sills some new perspective on the show. When the producers finally did approach him, he was more agreeable.

"A role like this comes along for an actor once in a lifetime," he says. "If I didn't take a shot at it one more time, I felt I'd be missing an important opportunity."

Clearly, Sills is still having fun with the show. During one of the first shows on the tour, a microphone belched loudly while Sills' character Percy was talking to the Prince of Wales.

"There's this huge sound like the expelling of gas, and it happened just as the prince has the line, 'Is that you, Percy?' Sills recalls. "The audience went berserk. I had to ad lib. I said, 'Late lunch, Majesty.' The audience howled. That sort of thing, to be so present in the character, must have come from my ACT training."

Raised in the suburbs of Detroit, Sills went to the University of Michigan, but after graduation, he was undecided about his future. He auditioned for ACT but feared he didn't have the guts to go through with the acting thing. As a backup, he began preparing for law school and took the LSATs. Then his father offered some advice.

"My dad encouraged me to do what I loved," Sills says. "In a Jewish home like mine, the parents get pleasure providing their children with opportunities they did not have. I'm very grateful for the push he gave me."

For a while, with the Tony nomination and a host of other awards, Sills was the toast of Broadway and is still touted as one of the Great White Way's emerging leading men.

"All that stuff, the attention, the celebrity, it's a real head trip," he says. "You could get carried away with it and think you're hot stuff. But I'm old enough to know it means almost nothing. At least it's on the outskirts of nothing. It's great only if it helps me work with other talented people. If you have half a brain, which I hope I have, you can't take it seriously. You just keep on doing the work."

-Chad Jones, ANG Newspapers
April 3, 2000




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