'Three Musketeers' panto at People's Light is madcap merriness
So it's come to this, after all the cutbacks, layoffs, furloughs, and rising unemployment rates: The Three Musketeers are now a barnyard chicken, a hound, and a barmaid. All for one and one for all? Or is it all for naught?
So it's come to this, after all the cutbacks, layoffs, furloughs, and rising unemployment rates: The Three Musketeers are now a barnyard chicken, a hound, and a barmaid. All for one and one for all? Or is it all for naught?
Actually, it's all for laughs.
I smiled continuously through the entire two acts of the outrageously silly The Three Musketeers (The Later Years), when I wasn't guffawing or just chuckling like a kid - though not exactly like the kids who sat with parents and grandparents at People's Light and Theatre Company in Malvern at Sunday's matinee, the day after the show officially opened.
That double standard - children understanding and laughing at a story differently from adults moved by its cheekier aspects - is a hallmark of good pantos, the holiday-season shows that consume Britain's stages, encourage audience response throughout, and are now a treasured trademark of People's Light, the only professional U.S. stage that regularly produces them.
The Three Musketeers is People's Light's seventh panto, and before I get to the swordsmen, or whatever they are, pause for a paragraph or two to consider an irony: A new Broadway musical about Spider-Man costs over $60 million, is delayed, and its producers beg understanding because it has no out-of-town tryout. Other musicals may take five years to develop, test in regional theaters, and, yes, when they are good, that pays off: They're really good.
A People's Light panto is no Broadway musical. But it is a top-to-bottom original musical by a large regional company with professional actors and a creative team that builds and polishes it inside a year - with no tryout elsewhere. And no one asks for understanding about anything. Should People's Light be doing Spider-Man?
Thankfully, they are instead ripping into poor old Alexandre Dumas' story of the young d'Artagnan (Andrew Kane), who becomes the favored tagalong of the crafty musketeers (Tom Teti, Chris Faith, and Brad DePlanche). As always, the clever playwright Kathryn Petersen somehow respects the underpinning of the original story even as her sixth panto slices and dices it - in this case right down to a plot piece about the queen's jewelry.
Ah, the queen. She's the delightful Mark Lazar, always the cross-dresser in the panto, whose theatrical format demands a man in a dress, a messy chase, and a talking animal (there are two, both terrific: Richard Ruiz as a hound, Rachel Brennan as a chicken).
How all this fits together, I can't say; like most pantos, you had to be there. It's something to do with the hound and hen and the missing d'Artagnan's fiancee (the super Kim Carson) taking over for the musketeers, who've been exiled and can't fight the horrible, hissable Lord Mazarotti (a wonderfully nasty Pete Pryor, in his third stint also as the panto director), who has the young king (Michael Doherty) under his misleading influence.
The less you know the better off you are, even while watching. Just go with the flow of the actors, Michael Ogborn's smart, catchy score (his fourth panto), and Alisa Sickora Kleckner's idea of 17th-century costumes. Enjoy it all, even one part done in black light, the only thing that doesn't work. Or, who knows, maybe that was its point.
