'Pimpernel' a Fun Aesthetic Disaster
Saint Paul Pioneer Press
"The Scarlet Pimpernel" is not, by any reasonable standard, a good show. It is, however, a gosh-darned entertaining one.
How can this be?
Let's take that first sentence first. The musical, thrice retooled while on Broadway, is still pretty much an aesthetic disaster. Nan Knighton's libretto concerning the title character -- a fey dandy by day and a swashbuckling hero by night -- is so rudimentary that it feels like a Cliff Notes version of a Classics Illustrated comic.
Frank Wildhorn's music is completely divorced from the era of the play (the French Revolution); it has a distinctly American easy-listening sound, the kind of when-in-doubt-modulate-to-a-different-key stuff that delivers emotional cues with a sledgehammer blow (hint: your heart is supposed to thump a little faster when you hear those big timpani rolls).
But the music sounds like Mozart compared Knighton's lyrics. Quick-eared audience members will be able to predict the second rhyming word in many of the couplets, and what the text lacks in imagination, it compensates for in obviousness (actual lyric from Act Two: "They seek him here, they seek him there/Those Frenchies seek him everywhere").
Throw in some cheeseball special effects (which raise the question of why you would want to behead someone on stage during a musical comedy, anyway) and a set that looks like it might fit folded up in the cast's suitcases, and you've got the pedigree for a show that has four legs and barks, right?
Well, not exactly.
Like "Springtime for Hitler," the apocryphal musical from the film "The Producers," "The Scarlet Pimpernel" is so bad that it's actually good.
This is due almost completely to the performance of Douglas Sills in the title role. Playing the Scarlet Pimpernel made him a star on Broadway, and it's easy to see why. He splashes around in the character exactly like a kid with a new blow-up wading pool: He knows it's a cheap toy and it's bound to explode eventually, but for the time being, he's having the time of his life.
As the foppish nobleman Percy, Sills is continually hilarious, dressed in ever more frilly and outlandish costumes, shrieking and mopping his bow furiously at the sight of anything resembling confrontation. But his alter ego is cunning, quick-witted and fearless -- sort of like James Bond with a sword. Sills lends equal authenticity and enthusiasm to each guise.
His nemesis, Chauvelin, is a cheap knock-off of Javert from "Les Miserables," so William Paul Michals wisely dispenses with anything resembling a full-fledged character, making Chauvelin a cartoonishly evil dude.
Both have fine strong voices, as does Amy Bodnar, who plays Percy's long-suffering wife, Marguerite. This is fortunate, because although she gives her all to Wildhorn's power ballads, her overall characterization -- particularly her accent, which evaporates when she sings -- has all the Gallic authenticity of french toast.
You're not going to find any Great Art in "The Scarlet Pimpernel." If you're fussy about the craft of playmaking, you're unlikely to find much that will cheer you. But if you can spend 50 bucks a ticket without blinking and you're in the mood for some unapologetically populist piffle sometime between now and March 18, you might just want to head down to the Ordway. It's nothing for the ages, but it will assuredly give you a giggle.
-Dominic Papatola, The Saint Paul Pioneer Press
March 9, 2000
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