Sills Brightens Dull Musical
The Actor Makes 'Scarlet Pimpernel'
San Francisco Chronicle
In "The Scarlet Pimpernel," Douglas Sills doesn't merely
thwart the French Reign of Terror and save his marriage to a beautiful star of the Comedie Francaise in the process. He almost single-handedly makes this touring musical at the Orpheum Theatre worth seeing.
The show, based on Baroness Emmuska Orczy's 1905 romantic potboiler with book and lyrics by Nan Knighton ("Saturday Night Fever") and music by Frank Wildhorn ("Jekyll and Hyde"), folds a frothy historical fantasy into a score of soapy ballads and pop neoclassical chatter. Think a lesser "Les Miserables," told from the dark side of the French Revolution, with fop jokes, funny hats and a working guillotine.
By all accounts, "Pimpernel" is much improved since it opened on Broadway three years ago. The creators and "Side Show" director Robert Longbottom reworked the piece in 1998 and retooled it again for the road.
The tale of political intrigue, jealousy and romance is clearly told. The physical production is lavish but not very interesting to watch. The music, while not as relentless as "Jekyll and Hyde's," travels in Wildhorn's customary banal groove. Better it may be, but "Pimpernel" remains a largely undistinguished work of musical theater.
Sills, an ex-San Francisco actor in a career-making role, brings out the best of it with a performance that both affirms the show's ardor and floats above it, lightly amused that everyone's making such a fuss. This isn't really history, he reminds us. It's a musical, with fun as the principal matter at stake.
Sills plays Sir Percival Blakeney, an Englishman who marries the French actress Marguerite (Amy Bodnar), then comes to believe that she's a traitor. After brooding alone through his wedding night, he recruits a league of fellow English idlers away from tea and cricket to battle the forces of Robespierre (a dryly amusing David Cromwell, who doubles as the Prince of Wales).
Percy's French rival is Citizen Chauvelin (William Paul Michals). In addition to their political differences, both men are in love with Marguerite. There's blackmail, a few beheadings and several fashion shows for Percy and his men, who cover their tracks in France by playing up their English foppery. Real men don't wear lace.
Percy takes on a second disguise, as a Belgian spy who gains his rival's confidence. Vigorous but light-footed, and a vocal quick-change artist, Sills is the show's protean life force. His strong jaw, twinkly eyes and pompadour give him matinee-idol looks, but Sills never strikes a pose. He's in motion all the time, wagging his chin and eyebrows at a line and channeling Robin Williams when it comes to taunting the sober Chauvelin.
Sills doesn't have the most lustrous voice in the show, but he enters and shapes his numbers as if he believes in them. He finds more emotional content in his murmurous "Prayer," rambunctious "They Seek Him Here" -- and soaring "She Was There" than his co-stars do in their stand-and-deliver solos and ensembles. Bodnar makes an oddly bloodless Marguerite. Michals has the requisite dark glower in voice and bearing, but not much villainous charisma. The show becomes a more static spectacle whenever Sills is absent.
Longbottom has some fun with the production numbers, adding shades of "La Cage aux Folles" and "A Chorus Line" to the fops. Andrew Jackness' symmetrical settings and painted drops and Jane Greenwood's costumes, both set off by sputtering faux-candlelight, are picturesque.
Agile as he is, Sills can take "The Scarlet Pimpernel" only so far. The show maintains its buoyant sense of fun right down to the last cut of the guillotine. But the book and songs never make the story or characters matter very much. Sills makes gold out of it all by staying loose and light, even when everything in life's at peril.
-Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle
April 7, 2000
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