This Time, He’s Dressed to Kill

We seek him here, we seek him there,

Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.

Is he in heaven? Is he in hell?

That demmed, elusive Pimpernel.

--From the 1905 novel “The Scarlet Pimpernel”

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What’s big and red and redone all over? Why “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” of course.

Not the original “Scarlet Pimpernel,” that dashing English gent, a.k.a. Sir Percy Blakeney, who dons a foppish disguise in order to rescue innocent aristocrats from the guillotine during the French Revolution whilst keeping his identity secret from even his French wife, the lovely Marguerite. The prototype of countless masked avengers to follow has earned his schmaltzy place in the annals of popular literature. Not the 1935 film version of the swashbuckling hero as played by Leslie Howard, nor the half-dozen other movie remakes since. And not even Daffy Duck as the Scarlet Pumpernickel.

No, this is “The Scarlet Pimpernel” of Broadway, with book and lyrics by Nan Knighton and music by Frank Wildhorn. First opened in 1997, he’s just about the most famous fop--or rather, flop--to be given a new life in a long time.

A bomb when it first swished and swooped its way out in front of the critics a few years ago, “The Scarlet Pimpernel” was destined to rise again. Sensing a cash cow in the old boy, a band of merry money men came along and gave the hunky hero and dashing dandies a major make-over. They reopened the show to better notices and--need we even say it?--popular appeal and the boffo box office that goes with it.

Now, some four versions later, “The Scarlet Pimpernel” has become what’s often referred to as a crowd-pleaser, complete with die-hard fans and an ongoing franchise. The show opens at the Ahmanson Theatre on Wednesday, directed and choreographed by Robert Longbottom and starring Douglas Sills in the title role.

Whence the good fortune, for the masked man to be rescued from theatrical oblivion just as he snatches seemingly doomed Frenchies from the chopping block? “It was an unusual decision,” says executive producer Tim Hawkins, with a kind of understatement rare for a producer. “The show just hadn’t quite gotten into the end zone in the first version, and so that was our goal.”

For art’s sake, perchance, or is this a new wrinkle in the methods of harvesting theatrical product for the global marketplace? Where shows used to be developed on the road before Broadway, the “Scarlet Pimpernel” precedent suggests that New York itself can now be used as a proving ground and development lab.

Not surprisingly, Hawkins and his colleagues saw a sound business move beneath the Pimpernel’s flashy garb. They won’t talk dollars, but previous reports have put the price tag of the redo, on a show that originally cost about $10 million, at about $2 million.

In other words, the Pimpernel, as they say in the trade, has legs.

“We always knew that we would tour the show,” Hawkins says. “And a show like this has a long life in stock and amateur, and that has ongoing ramifications for everyone, financial and otherwise. There will be foreign productions. And we’ve always been intending to do something in television. There are many revenue streams, and we’re in the process of recouping the investment and in getting ongoing value from the investment.”

Clearly, somebody is buying tickets. This could be attributed to the fact that there are very few musicals playing these days, and tickets to “The Lion King” can be hard to come by. Or that, as Andrew Lloyd Webber and others have proven, there’s a certain kind of fare that does well with Manhattan tourists and others who are otherwise unaccustomed to going to the theater.

“It’s deliberately old-fashioned and always was,” Knighton says of the show. “I set out to do real well-rounded entertainment, like a ‘40s or ‘50s movie, and I think that is the quality our supporters like. That says we are what we are and that nobody takes themselves too seriously.”

“I like to think of it as a guilty pleasure, not unlike the way people talk about ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,’ ” adds Sills. “No one will admit they’re watching it, but somebody’s watching it.”

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The original Pimpernel is the love child of a Baroness Emmuska Orczy, a.k.a. Mrs. Montagu Barstow, a composer’s daughter born in 1865 Hungary who moved with her family to England at age 15.

Orczy wrote the novel about her dapper hero in a mere five weeks but couldn’t get any publishers interested. She then turned the story into a play, which became a hit, and, lo and behold, the novel was published shortly thereafter, in 1905. Orczy went on to pen many sequels and other romance novels before her death in 1947, but “The Scarlet Pimpernel” was her big hit, the one that made her rich.

The story may be better known thanks to the English film starring Howard. Many years later, in the early 1970s, a then-12-year-old Sills and his mother were watching this film on TV. He had already expressed a desire to be an actor, and she had him watch Howard’s performance as an example of what the art was all about. “I’ll never forget it,” he says. “My mother, pointing at the black-and-white TV set, and she says, ‘See, he knows what to do--and he’s Jewish, too.’ ”

It must have made an impression. After undergraduate work in theater at the University of Michigan, Sills went on to train as a classical actor at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. He graduated in 1985 and moved to L.A. the following year.

He began to get on his feet as a working actor, doing regional theater and guest spots on TV. “I did some classical theater, up and down the West Coast, and a couple of national tours of musicals--’Into the Woods’ and ‘The Secret Garden,’ ” says Sills, 39, speaking by phone from a tour stop in San Francisco. He was a charter member of the classical Antaeus Company and has performed at such respected venues as the Mark Taper Forum, La Jolla Playhouse and South Coast Repertory.

About the same time, Knighton and Wildhorn had the idea for the vehicle that would provide a Broadway breakthrough for Sills. “I started my work as a lyricist in 1989,” Knighton recalls. “Frank and I wrote about half of the score that remains today in ‘89-90, although we continued not to have a book. In ‘93, I decided I would try and write the book myself. We did three workshops, and I did massive rewriting through those too.”

There were never any out-of-town tryouts for the first version of “The Scarlet Pimpernel.” Instead it went straight to Broadway, opening at the Minskoff Theater in November 1997. Directed by Peter Hunt, the cast was led by Sills, Christine Andreas as his wife and Terrence Mann as his nemesis, Chauvelin.

It was trashed by the critics. Newsday’s Linda Winer found the show “terrible.” Of the composer, whose “Jekyll and Hyde” was also on Broadway at the time, she said, “Wildhorn writes costume dramas for people who find ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ too hard.”

“[If] it’s pulse-racing suspense and derring-do you’re after, you would be better off watching tourists crossing against the light in Times Square,” said the New York Times’ Ben Brantley.

The one element to escape relatively unscathed was Sills. “There is one conspicuous asset,” wrote Brantley. “And that is its leading man. . . . But Mr. Sills doesn’t have the chance to register as much more than an affable guide in a wax museum.”

The show proved relatively critic-proof, thanks to a strong advance. By summer of 1998, however, things were looking shaky. Houses were going half-empty, the advance had pretty much been depleted, and the first producers were considering closing the show.

That’s when the new producers came riding to the rescue. Financier Ted Forstmann, big in the world of leveraged buyouts and one of the original producers of the show, approached David W. Checketts, president and CEO of Madison Square Garden, which is owned by Cablevision Systems Corp.

“We decided that we would become the new producers,” says Hawkins, head of Cablevision’s Radio City Entertainment Theatricals (a division of Madison Square Garden) and the show’s new executive producer. That was in July 1998. “Over the following three months, what we did was to radically rethink the show.”

Hawkins hired Longbottom, who had scored critically in the previous season with “Side Show” and has been directing and choreographing the annual “Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular” since 1994. They also hired two new co-stars, Rachel York and Rex Smith.

In September, rehearsals began. While the original cast continued to perform the show at night, the new version of the show was being crafted during the day. Sills, the one major common component in the two incarnations, did double duty.

Versed in the rigors of repertory from his stints at the California Shakespeare Festival, the actor proved up to the task. “Everyone thought the burden of doing both at once was the problem, and that wasn’t the problem,” Sills says. “The difficulty was that I was working on a character during the day and playing a different version at night for a different director.

“I enjoyed the dare, if you will, of revamping an existing show that had been trashed by everyone important and lost money.”

Indeed, the process wasn’t easy. “All the rewrites had to happen within two weeks,” Knighton says. “We had to move like wildfire because we were only going to shut the show down for something like a week.”

Still, they were grateful for the chance to have another whack at it. “We all felt that there was room for improvement,” Knighton says. “So this really was the product of having a year to stand in the back and see what didn’t work.”

Longbottom, who was unavailable for comment, worked closely with Knighton. “We streamlined it down a lot,” she says. “I don’t think that there were any great changes in character, writing style or humor. It was mostly structural changes.”

As the one principal holdover, Sills was in a unique position to compare the directorial approaches. “The first director is an actors’ director, and he cast me, and I will be forever indebted,” Sills says, referring to Hunt. “I think he would agree musical staging is not his strength, and I don’t think he had the help he wanted from his first choreographer. So the musical staging is vastly improved.”

Longbottom’s innovations included rearranging several of the musical numbers, as well as reconceptualizing them to serve a different purpose within the context of the show. For example, a number called “The Creation of Man,” explains Sills, “used to be Percy and his men trying to get the prince to go along with them. And now it is a full-scale ‘Hello, Dolly!’ production number, and it is the show-stopping number.

“There was an attempt to create a more singular style or uniform tone in the new show,” Sills says. “In general, Bobby projected a traditional American musical schematic on a play that may not have had a strong fingerprint, made it much easier to digest and, for the new corporate owners, much easier to replicate. The new show is far less dependent on the personality of a single performer.”

“The Scarlet Pimpernel” 2.0 was first trotted out in November 1998, and it did indeed receive kinder, gentler reviews. Writing in the New York Times, Vincent Canby called it “a virtually different show. . . . ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’ is now what it should always have been: a lighthearted, prettily appointed entertainment.” Similarly, Winer captured the ambivalence of many reviewers: “Well, it’s back and it’s better. In fact, there are moments when it is positively, almost, even rather lovable. A little.

“The show has been effectively rearranged so that the scenes build, the scenic elevator gets plenty of work and Wildhorn’s vanilla pudding ballads--many with new reprises--occasionally even seem to fit the dramatic situations,” Winer wrote.

Alas, back when “The Scarlet Pimpernel” hadn’t been doing so well, the Minskoff had booked the incoming “Saturday Night Fever” (coincidentally, also with a book by Knighton). Consequently, “The Scarlet Pimpernel” was about to be without a boudoir to call its own as of July 1999.

Another Broadway theater, the Neil Simon, was found for the coming fall, and in the meantime, the show was put back in the shop once again. Some costumes and set pieces were rebuilt, new cast members were integrated, and there were more rehearsals.

The new version, “The Scarlet Pimpernel” 3.0, was taken for a spin in Houston, Dallas and Atlanta. This was also the first version that did not have Sills, who had hung up his frock coat when they closed at the Minskoff.

“The version we took on the road last summer didn’t have too many changes,” Knighton says. “That reworking had more to do with the new cast, and with Bobby getting a chance to put more of his overall visual concepts for the show into place.”

The show was back on Broadway from the fall of 1999 through January of this year, when it closed. Sills rejoined the show for the national tour, largely because of the chance to play an L.A. engagement. The road show began in New Haven in February and has made stops in St. Paul, Seattle, San Francisco and Sacramento. It will continue on through the summer of 2001, but without Sills, who lives in Los Angeles and will swash his last bucklers at the Ahmanson.

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Once again, changes have been made for the L.A. production, making this version 4.0, for those of you who are still keeping count. “The show starts out in the theater,” Knighton says. “In the old versions, it ended at the sea coast, with a big sword fight. Bobby had said, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting to end the show back in the theater?’ And I fought it for a while. Then I began to think about that possibility more.

“There’s a section of the show where Percy and his men have to have a hide-out,” she says. “And I suddenly thought, ‘Why not make that the place where they hide out?’ So then it suddenly made sense to me that you would do a full circle. I literally sprang out of the bathtub one day when I thought of this idea. And that required a fair amount of rewriting and plot reworking.”

Such extensive tinkering--over the course of a year--was a gamble for the producers. But it was one that suggests they knew what they were doing. “We were uniquely positioned to do this because we do annual shows here [in New York]--the Radio City Christmas spectacular and an annual version of ‘A Christmas Carol,’ ” Hawkins says. “So we’re accustomed to not looking at shows as static but as ongoing, living, breathing organisms.”

“Probably every show would improve, but so few shows get the opportunity,” Knighton says. “That’s probably the most unique part--not that the artists have continued to reshape it, but that there have been producers willing to let them do that, including making new costumes and sets for each version.”

Indeed, the very public nature of the retooling that “The Scarlet Pimpernel” has undergone since the summer of 1998 may be its ticket to fame. Certainly it’s a good bet that the show will be remembered more for this unusual production history than, say, its artistic innovation.

As Sills puts it, “This show has been this incredible phoenix that has never really brushed all the ashes off its wings.” *

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“The Scarlet Pimpernel,” Ahmanson Theatre, Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown. Tuesdays-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Additional performances: next Sunday, May 14, 21 and 28, 7:30 p.m.; June 1, 8 and 15, 2 p.m. Ends June 18. $25-$70. (213) 628-2772.