Red Alert
Area audiences
first to view superior 'Scarlet Pimpernel'
From the Dallas Morning News
07/28/99
By Lawson Taitte
Dallas had the good luck Tuesday to see the best performance The Scarlet Pimpernel has had to date.
The Frank Wildhorn-Nan Knighton musical opened on Broadway in 1997. A year later, new director Robert Longbottom made wholesale changes - widely praised in New York, but not necessarily all improvements. Still, for sheer escapist entertainment, only The Lion King has topped The Scarlet Pimpernel over the last three Broadway seasons.
A few weeks ago the show closed in New York temporarily to take on new stars and to slim down for a smaller theater. The Dallas Summer Musicals craftily signed this fresh company up for Texas before it sees Broadway in September.
If you watch old movies, you recall that the story involves an English aristocrat, Percy, who marries a Frenchwoman, Marguerite. She may be a spy for Robespierre's revolutionary government. As the mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel - an 18th-century 007 - he forms a group to rescue innocents from the guillotine. But he doesn't tell his wife for fear she will pass the information on to her former lover, the French bully Chauvelin.
Mr. Longbottom's ideas are sometimes staggeringly lowbrow, but his new cast helps us overlook the worst. Ron Bohmer still has to mince and prance excessively as Percy. But there's steel aplenty under all the satin and lace of his foppish disguises. Mr. Bohmer's strong tenor sails out with a civilized virility that transcends all those Cage aux Folles moments.
Carolee Carmello, fresh from her Tony Award nomination for last season's ill-fated Parade, brings the same virtues to her Marguerite: acute psychology, sizzling passion and a voice that can belt with the best. Mr. Wildhorn's style for her songs veers between Streisand and Piaf. Ms. Carmello encompasses both extremes and remains her own woman.
Marc Kudisch's predecessors as Chauvelin got by on charisma and charm. Mr. Kudisch actually acts. His songs aren't always well suited to his vocal range, but when he's able to cut loose he can be thrilling. Thanks to him and his colleagues, we can take the central love triangle - and thus The Scarlet Pimpernel - more seriously than ever before.