Saving the French
Eastside Journal
Because of its amusing story, emotional music and high-tech staging, "The Scarlet Pimpernel" is engaging.
Its star, however, is spectacular. If Douglas Sills stood on stage and asked the audience to come up and shine his shoes, it's likely that they would.
Sills, who originated his lead role of Percy on Broadway, has a star quality that comes from total engagement in his role and a sort of extrasensory perception with his audience. "There's one at every ball," he dead-panned from the staged party scene 50 feet away from a child in the audience who had cried out.
Sills as Percy is prissy yet studly in this comic take on Brits and the French Revolution. He mixes John Barrymore classic hero action with Steve Martin antics.
The plot of "The Scarlet Pimpernel" is "Les Miz" with tea and crumpets. In Fance, Robespierre is beheading innocent French citizens. In England, Percy convices his chums at the club to sail across the English Channel with him and rescue the poor Frenchmen. Never mind that Percy has just web Marguerite (winsome soprano Amy Bodnar) and has not yet consummated the union.
Percy and his pals decide their best disguise is to become exaggerated versions of themselves - foppish dandies. They won't be mistaken for insurrectionists, they theorize, in pink and purple cravats, and in daffodil and magenta morning coats.
If we can tear ourselves away from Sills' dynamism, we do notice that music by Frank Wildhorn (also songwriter for another recent musical, Broadway's "Civil War") is appropriate but not truly memorable. "Into the Fire," the show's fight song, is probably the best remembered.
"Scarlet Pimpernel," in fact, was not a big winner in New York, Legendary Broadway songwriter Stephen Sondheim said recently about Wildhorn, "If you add up the millions lost on 'Civil War' and 'The Scarlet Pimpernel,' he's probably the most unsuccessful composer in the history of Broadway in terms of the amount of money lost."
But although the show didn't last on the Broadway stage, Sills earned a well-deserved Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations and the Theatre World Award.
At the Paramount, director Robert Longbottom goes for laughs and high energy. Scenic artist Andrew Jackness has brought to town what we now expect of touring musicals - trucks full of massive set pieces and the machinery to keep them flying and rotating like mad. An opening night audience applauded outrageous costumes by Jane Greenwood.
The derivative staging and music of "The Scarlet Pimpernel" might get lost in time in the minds of theatergoers, but Douglas Sills' performance will stick.
-Mary Martin, Eastside Journal
March 31, 2000
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