A Study in 'Scarlet'
Swashbuckler Makes its Way
from Broadway to S.F.
Ten years ago, Douglas Sills was a familiar face on Bay Area stages. This week, he returns to San Francisco in a Broadway hit.
Sills is playing the title role in "The Scarlet Pimpernel," the swashbuckling musical based on Baroness Orczy's classic novel of romance, adventure and intrigue set against the drama of the French Revolution. It's the role he's been playing to great acclaim on Broadway, and the role for which he was nominated for a Tony Award.
With music by Frank Wildhorn ("Jekyll and Hyde"), book and lyrics by Nan Knighton, and choreography and stage direction by Robert Longbottom, the musical opens Wednesday at the Orpheum Theatre.
Sills, a Detroit native, received his training at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater and worked in regional theaters around the West Coast. East Bay audiences may remember him with the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival (later Cal Shakes) in the company's years at John Hinkel Park, where he played an aristocratic Orsino, an energetic Cassio and a fun-loving Ned Poins, among others.
Those roles, he says, prepared him for the demands of "Pimpernel" -- an intensely physical role he's been performing eight times a week for two years. In a recent phone call from Seattle, where the show just made its West Coast premiere, Sills said his classical background gave him the tools to play the masked hero.
"There's no way I'd be doing this now if I hadn't worked in regional theater," said Sills, who is onstage for 90 percent of the show -- singing, dancing, dueling and playing Pimpernel's mild-mannered alter ego, Percy. "I learned so much in those years, and this is really coming home for me."
After he left the Bay Area, Sills moved to Los Angeles, where he developed his comic skills on television shows including "Murphy Brown," "Sisters" and "Party of Five."
But Broadway is a long way from regional theater and sitcoms, and the leap to a leading role in a $12 million dollar musical is a huge one. Sills auditioned six times for the "Pimpernel" producers before he was cast.
"I knew I didn't have much of a chance because I wasn't a big name," he says. "But I thought I might get a smaller part. At first, I wanted them to see me as the villain."
The producers saw him as a leading man, though, and they brought him back for repeated auditions on both coasts -- even as the role was being offered to Hollywood stars such as Kevin Kline. "Later, he came to see the show and I thanked him for not taking it," Sills says of Kline. "He said, 'Are you kidding? I'd never work that hard again.'"
But for Sills, the work was just beginning. "Pimpernel" was a hit with audiences, but the critics thought the show was a muddle (they liked Sills, though).
"They were confused about whether it was a frothy comedy or a tragedy like 'Les Miz,'" says Sills. "It didn't fit neatly into a previous genre of musical theater on Broadway."
But rather than close the show, the producers made the unusual decision to revamp it. That meant performing the original show at night, even as Sills was rehearsing the new version during the day. It was exhausting, he says, although his experience had prepared him.
"That's what you do in repertory theater," he says. "But, unlike rep, I was rehearsing the same show and same character, changing the color and tone of the character, doing new choreography, a new order of scenes. It was hard to keep it straight, and I made some mistakes at night -- which was funny, especially in the sword fights."
In 1998, the show reopened, and critics who had previously panned it wrote rave reviews. "For the first time in history, the New York Times reversed itself," Sills asserts.
With several cast changes, massive revisions to the staging and clarification as to the show's tone -- all of which Sills credits to Longbottom -- "Pimpernel" has now gone through three incarnations. "We now call it 'Pimpernel 4.0,'" he says.
The current tour, which started in New Haven and Minneapolis, will include stops in Sacramento, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Boston and Chicago.
"We've had tremendous response, and that's why the show has persevered, because the producers saw that people loved it," he says. "It's not an intellectual journey. But it's a lot of fun, and it's become sort of a guilty pleasure, even for intellectual theater types."
Because of its French Revolution setting, Sills says that many people are surprised to find it's essentially a comedy. "I hear this a lot, especially from men who got dragged to it by their wives," he says. "They come expecting a history lesson, and go out saying they can't believe how much fun it was."
Sills, who read the original 1905 novel and researched the French Revolution in preparation for the part, says that people have always loved the Pimpernel. He notes that the story was adapted for the stage in 1903 -- even before the book found a publisher -- and says he's aware of at least seven film versions.
"The Pimpernel was the first masked superhero," he says. "Zorro, Batman, the Green Hornet, all of those guys who disguised themselves to do heroic deeds -- they all came from this."
Sills says he's lucky that the musical version got another chance. "Rarely has a piece had the opportunities that 'Pimpernel' has had to improve itself," he says. "We were really able to take what worked, hold onto it, and distill what was great about it."
And he's both "excited and honored" to bring the show back to the town where he honed his skills. "It's a little like the prodigal son coming home," he says. "And it's kind of funny to come home in a musical. The whole time I was at ACT, I kept the fact that I sang a secret."
-Georgia Rowe, Contra Costa Times
March 31, 2000
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