'Scarlet Pimpernel' Composer is a
Broadway Triple Threat
Talk about beginner's luck. The first three musicals that pop composer Frank Wildhorn wrote made it to Broadway. And one of them, "The Scarlet Pimpernel," is about to play Sacramento. The national touring company, which includes Broadway star Douglas Sills, will perform eight times this week at the Community Center Theater beginning Tuesday night.
Wildhorn was the first composer in 22 years to have three shows running simultaneously on the Great White Way. "The Civil War" lasted three months, closing this past summer, and "The Scarlet Pimpernel" played for three years before closing Jan. 2. "Jekyll and Hyde" remains, enjoying more than 1,200 performances over four years.
"Now, that's moving into some rarified air," said Wildhorn, 41.
He was on the phone from New York, where he lives most of the time. He also spends a few months each year in Texas, where he is an artistic associate at Houston's Alley Theatre. He launched "Jekyll and Hyde" and "The Civil War" there and wrote most of "The Scarlet Pimpernel" while living in an apartment in a Houston hotel.
It was in Houston in 1990 that Wildhorn's wife, Linda Eder, became a theatrical star portraying the prostitute Lucy in his "Jekyll and Hyde." Sacramento audiences saw her when the show came through here in August 1995.
"Sacramento was one of the stops on the pre-Broadway tour," Wildhorn said. "We had a terrific stay there."
Both "Jekyll and Hyde" and "The Civil War" were Wildhorn's ideas, but the notion of a musical version of "The Scarlet Pimpernel" came to him from a producer in the early 1990s. Nan Knighton wrote the book and lyrics.
"I found a musical vocabulary I thought would work and gathered a creative team," Wildhorn said. "We found Doug Sills at our auditions in Los Angeles. He took our breath away. He's like Danny Kaye for the next millennium, a combination of a musical talent, a great actor and a terrific comedian. You put that all together and he's so entertaining."
Sills was nominated for a Tony Award in 1998 but lost out to Alan Cumming, the star of "Cabaret."
"Doug should have won," Wildhorn said. "He certainly deserved the nomination and had a wonderful year. It's magic when the right person and the right part come together. Yul Brynner will always be the king in 'The King and I.' Rex Harrison will always be Henry Higgins. And Doug Sills will always be the Scarlet Pimpernel."
Before Wildhorn became the darling of Broadway composers, he was a successful mainstream composer. His work has been recorded by such singers as Whitney Houston ("Where Do Broken Hearts Go"), Natalie Cole and Freddie Jackson ("I Do"), Kenny Rogers ("Don't Look in My Eyes"), Helen Reddy, ("Don't Tell Me Tonight") and Angela Bofill ("Midnight Shine").
All three of Wildhorn's stage shows are on national tour, and he expects that by this time next year "The Scarlet Pimpernel" will join the others on the international circuit.
"I write for the people, and to get out there and have shows tour makes me feel so good," Wildhorn said.
Meanwhile, he is busy writing musicals based on "Alice in Wonderland," the legend of Dracula, the story of Bonnie and Clyde, the movie "Blade Runner" and an updated version of "Carmen." He also wrote "Havana" for his wife, in which she'll play a big-band singer in the 1940s.
Despite his track record on Broadway, Wildhorn knows the odds are against any of these shows making it there.
"Every year," he said, "thousands of records are released, thousands of hours of television are produced, thousands of books are published and hundreds of movies are released. In a good year, you'll have only five or six new musicals on Broadway. It's a big gamble, so expensive. And if a show doesn't work from the beginning, it's gone. So, we will cross our fingers."
-Dixie Reed, Sacramento Bee
April 16, 2000
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