En Garde: 'The Three Musketeers' Aims for Broadway

Excitement was in the air on a recent Friday as producers, cast members, directors and staff of the North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, Massachusetts, met over lunch with BroadwayWorld.com to discuss their plans to bring their new musical, The Three Musketeers, to Broadway. With music by George Stiles (Honk!, Tom Jones, Mary Poppins), lyrics by Paul Leigh (Tom Jones, Moll Flanders), and book by University of Cambridge author and editor Peter Raby (Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde and Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter), this latest adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas classic seems to be in very good hands.

But will audiences embrace yet another retelling of the dense 1625 tale of young D'Artagnan as he fights to become a heroic servant to King Louis XIII of France, defending the monarch and his queen from the evil doings of Cardinal Richelieu, the Comte de Rochefort, and the mysterious Milady de Winter? Commercial producers Greg Schaffert and Bud Martin, along with director Francis Matthews and North Shore Music Theatre (NSMT) Artistic Director Jon Kimbell, think so. A work-in-progress since 1991, The Three Musketeers is now, finally, very close to being the show they all want to see open in New York very soon.

"This is the best it's ever been," says Matthews, who has returned to the project after eight years away from it. "We have resurrected some of the text from the 1999 student workshop production at the University of South Florida which I directed, and we have gotten back the original design team. A version in Switzerland had been funded by a textile company, so there were abundant costumes which made the show remote and operatic. Now we've gotten back to the student feel. The text is at its sparest and cleanest, and there are more dramatic scenes."

"For a while the show had gotten off track and became a bit of a costume drama, a love story," Schaffert adds. "We've gone back to our original concept to make it more earthy, more sexy. In December and January one of our co-producers, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, mounted a full production. It got strong reviews, but we took copious notes. There have been major revisions since Chicago. The show is more intimate now. It's edgier. We believe it is a show that has the potential for a wide audience."

Betting on Appeal

Schaffert's track record as a consulting producer indicates that he has a pretty good sense of what audiences will like. A producing associate at 321 Theatrical Management in New York, Schaffert and company have enjoyed their most notable recent successes with The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and the pop-u-lar juggernaut that has become a franchise unto itself despite mixed reviews from the critics, Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman's Wicked. Then again, Schaffert was also an associate producer for the flop All Shook Up, but he suggests that timing, not quality, may have sounded the death knell for that musical.

"I think All Shook Up got caught in the backlash against Juke Box musicals," says Schaffert. "Good Vibrations had just gone up and was panned. In reading the reviews of that show, it seemed as if the critics had already made up their minds about us, too. In addition, the audiences didn't seem to want our concept of creating an entirely new story around the Elvis Presley songs. Given the later success of Jersey Boys, it seems that fans of certain music prefer to hear the songs sung as they were by the originals. We weren't a Legends Concert, and that hurt us."

Iconic pop status of songs won't be an issue with The Three Musketeers. The George Stiles-Paul Leigh original score is a literate mix of moody soliloquies, power ballads, rousing ensemble numbers, and romantic duets all tinged with a haunting darkness and period orchestrations that give the show a very apt Renaissance feel. Some numbers, like the Act I closer Time sung and danced in precise clock-like movements by the entire company, are reminiscent of Frank Wildhorn's The Scarlet Pimpernel. Others, like D'Artagnan's recurring Riding to Paris theme, favor Sondheim and his Into the Woods. All, however, are smart, affecting, and worth repeated listening. They manage to tame and explain the unwieldy Dumas plot intricacies while also revealing the layers of emotion that drive each character to choose the paths they seem destined to follow. It's one of the strongest original scores to come along in quite some time.

"This version is a great humanist, romantic story full of ambiguity and questions," says Matthews. "It's not just boy meets girl, wicked woman defeats boy. It's the story of relationships played out against a background of war, period history, and political intrigue. There are layers to these people. It could be very easy for a story like this to become a pantomime, a spoof or a send up. Instead we have chosen to focus on the real substance of D'Artagnan's adventure, not the spectacle. It's a more intimate story, one in which the background informs the piece but doesn't overwhelm it."

Character Development

Broadway actress Kate Baldwin, who is playing the treacherous Milady de Winter in this NSMT production, agrees. Typically cast as the "optimistic girl next door," she is relishing the opportunity to flex her villainous muscles and create such a complex and powerful character. "I'm not all bad, I'm just misunderstood," Baldwin jokes. "But seriously, Milady is an immensely damaged person. She's not one-dimensionally evil. She is a survivor who never had a break. She's street smart. She has been hurt by a former relationship and is jealous of D'Artagnan's love for Constance. She deals with her loss by being vengeful.

"But there are also plenty of moments in which you begin to doubt her and perhaps believe in her apparent vulnerability and sincerity," she continues. "These are dangerous times in which she lives. There is tremendous immediacy to living life on the edge. Every relationship is heightened against the backdrop of war. For Milady, everything becomes that much more complex."

Baldwin's performance in The Three Musketeers is one of the many treasures of the NSMT production. Given three of the best songs in the show (Gentlemen, Lilacs, and the duet Beyond the Walls sung with the equally gifted Jenny Fellner as the Queen's seamstress Constance), Baldwin caresses every hidden meaning within Leigh's enigmatic lyrics. As she seduces first the Comte de Rochefort, then D'Artagnan, then the hard-bitten Musketeer Athos, then finally the trusting Constance to her Medusa-like will, she sings with such nuance and beautiful dexterity that it is unclear at times whether or not her Milady actually is the lonely, pitiable woman she pretends to be in order to win compassion from the "weak" men for whom she privately expresses bitter contempt. If this musical does make it to Broadway, Baldwin deserves to go with it.

Another strong performance is turned in by the actor on whose shoulders the story of The Three Musketeers is carried ? Aaron Tveit as D'Artagnan. A 23-year-old alum of the national tours of Hairspray (Link) and Rent (Roger/Steve), Tveit brings a winning, swaggering boyishness to the idealistic, romantic, sometimes foolish, but ultimately heroic character who chooses hope over despair even when life's disillusionments teach him painful lessons about loyalty and love.

"I see D'Artagnan as a boy who grew up listening to the stories his Dad told him about the Musketeers and their adventures," says Tveit. "All his life he's been waiting to use his tools. He thinks he'll be the top, but he falls flat on his face. He can adapt, though, because of his optimism. It's funny, he's just on the verge of manhood, but he ends up teaching the other Musketeers what manhood is really about."

Ongoing Process

Oddly enough, it's the three Musketeers ? Athos, Porthos and Aramis ? of the show's title who seem to need a bit more work before this show can really sing. Their main production number, The Life of a Musketeer, has a vague Jerry Herman La Cage Aux Folles/The Best of Times sound to it that just doesn't quite reach the exuberant level needed to lift the show to swashbuckling status. Swordfights are extraordinarily well staged, and the into battle song Ride On! has a quirky, humorous side to it. But it should also gallop and give goose bumps as D'Artagnan narrowly escapes capture on his way to save the Queen's jewels and reputation. Instead it lopes, a poor man's Into the Fire without the spine tingling finish.

Athos, here played with great depth and conviction by John Schiappa, does get a terrific character defining number called Take a Little Wine in which he drunkenly reveals his regrettable past. Porthos and Aramis, however, are drawn a bit more one dimensionally with the former coming across as a carousing clown and the latter as a bland poet/priest. Their gently comic number Pour la France does give a brief glimpse into their growing preference for female companionship over engaging in war, but their book scenes are more sketchily drawn. They seem more window dressing than essential cogs in the story. One never gets the indisputable sense that Athos, Porthos and Aramis are truly the "all for one and one for all" Three Inseparables they claim to be.

According to producers Schaffert and Martin, however, The Three Musketeers is likely to undergo even more changes before it makes its assault on New York. So there is still time to make what is already a strong show even more vibrant. This NSMT production, in fact, has been evolving as it's been in rehearsal. The Playbill on opening night had a revised song list glued over the previously printed page, indicating that four songs were cut and others had their order of performance changed. Clearly these producers and this creative team are committed to making The Three Musketeers the best show it can be.

"We need to perform in one more theater with a proscenium stage to work out the rest of the design and production elements," says Schaffert enthusiastically. "We performed on a thrust in Chicago and we're in the round here at North Shore. A proscenium stage will let us finish the set and see how it fills a Broadway-style theater.

"We are bringing lots of people in from regional theaters and New York to see the show here in Beverly," he continues. "We're hoping for another theatrical producing partner and investors who believe in it."

NSMT's Kimbell does believe in it. "When I first saw The Three Musketeers at the NAMT (North American Musical Theatre) Festival in 1999, I said, 'This show needs to be done,' " he affirms. "I think America is ready for a little honesty and heart, and this show has it. Of course, developing new works is risky, but that's what we have to do if we want to advance the art form. You never know what's going to strike audiences and be a hit. But you have to keep working at it. You just have to find the good stories and tell them."

The Three Musketeers continues at the North Shore Music Theatre, 62 Dunham Road, Beverly, Massachusetts, through Sunday, September 9. Tickets are available on line at www.nsmt.org or by calling the box office at 978-232-7200.

PHOTOS: John Schiappa (Athos) and Aaron Tviet (D'Artagnan) battle the Cardinal's men; Aaron Tviet (D'Artagnan) cradles Jenny Fellner (Constance); Kate Baldwin (Milady de Winter) seduces Aaron Tviet (D'Artagnan); John Schiappa (Athos), Kevyn Morrow (Aramis), and Jimmy Smagula (Porthos) are one for all.

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