'Scarlet Pimpernel' in Need of Rescuing
The Press Democrat
'La Cage aux Folles" meets the French Revolution as swashes buckle and fops swish. A league of prancing dandies stylishly tries to topple France's bloody Reign of Terror in "The Scarlet Pimpernel.
This amusing premise is stultified by egregiously inert songs in this historical musical comedy that would fare a heck of a lot better without the obligatory vapid love songs, robust ballads of moral courage and other generic modern musical fodder.
With moments of color, mirth and even suspense, the production's book by Nan Knighton is marred by its regrettable marriage to lame lyrics (also by Knighton) and tedious score (Frank Wildhorn) so instantly forgettable as to make one wonder why these folks conceived the show as a musical in the first place.
The 1905 novel "The Scarlet Pimpernel" by the Hungarian Baroness Orczy was so popular as to lead the author to serve up 10 sequels.
In recent years, Broadway producers have been likewise serving up heaping helpings of big budget commercial musicals at breakneck speed. For the most part, it's been a blur of mediocrity.
The only thing that sets the current production apart from the maddeningly nondescript crowd is a curve ball in the form of comic effeminacy.
Taking artistic license with history, the story is set during in the 1790s, when Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety were getting guillotine-giddy.
After La Comedie Francais is shut down, French actress Marguerite leaves for England with her fianc�, Percy, where they sing, dance and marry and plan for domestic bliss.
But immediately following their pastoral nuptials (they sing the bland and drippy "You Are My Home"), Percy receives evidence that his new wife is in fact a spy for the revolution.
Though at first he disbelieves ("I know her as I know my own heart," goes some of the trite dialogue), he soon accepts this and decrees that he shall find a way to right this wrong, if it takes his whole life.
After a chaste wedding night, he convinces his compatriots to join him in sabotaging the Reign of Terror.
They will do so by employing undercover trickery and will avert suspicion to themselves by posing as the those least likely to be brave, politically-minded men of honor and action: They will pose as fops and dandies.
While the execution of this is lively and comical, there is something vaguely insulting to gays about the whole thing.
England was and still is full of foppish gentlemen who are resolutely heterosexual, but the term is indeed coded to mean gay.
And the behavior and personality of Percy and his league of flouncing aesthetes certainly seems to convey a gaggle of raging queens.
Still, as Percy, Douglas Sill's outrageous dandyism is the best thing about this otherwise musical-as-usual. The over-the-top Rockettes number in which Percy and his band of merry men dress to the nines ("The Creation of Man") is, furthermore, the only time when a musical number actually adds to - rather than detracts from - the entertainment.
Jane Greenwood's costumes are vividly amusing as Percy, dressed in a leopard skin get-up, leads a line of pastel-clad peacocks who dance with scarves and sing that they shall shimmer to deflect suspicion.
"Injustice," they decree, "is a tough slice of mutton."
It is their duty to rush not to battle, but to the tailor. This madcap dance number, choreographed with verve by director Robert Longbottom, is a pleasing swerve from the show's other cookie-cutter musical interludes.
Meanwhile, both sides of the English Channel are abuzz with speculation about the mysterious Lone Ranger known as the Scarlet Pimpernel. English women are aflush with crushes, French extremists are frustrated by his cleverness.
Chauvelin, a Robespierre Jacobin, is intent on catching this scurrilous phantom. Chauvelin (played by William Paul Michaels as a stock villain, all in black) has a history with Marguerite and blackmails her into helping him catch the culprit.
Amy Bodnar give a weak performance as Marguerite, sacrificing a convincing portrayal for an annoying French accent which achieves maximum pout.
In one climactic scene of would-be high drama, in which her husband faces the guillotine, Bodnar's poor performance punctures the moment, leaving it impotent.
As the valiant English brigade outwits the corrupt regime, comic foppery recedes to unexceptional sword play and adventure-as-usual.
While laughing at sissies in near-drag is endless fun, valor in and of itself, tends to make for boring theater.
-Erika Milvy, The Press Democrat
April 9, 2000
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