Word: pimpernels
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...Moment and Once Upon a Dream is hardly likely to be a gloomy Gus. But Frank Wildhorn just may be Broadway's most happy fella. A virtual unknown on the Great White Way nine months ago, he is the composer of two musicals, Jekyll & Hyde and The Scarlet Pimpernel, which have survived mostly scathing reviews to become box-office successes. A self-described "blue-collar professional songwriter" who has supplied material for the likes of Natalie Cole and Whitney Houston, he now has enough theater projects to keep him busy into the next millennium, and maybe the one after that...
...Lloyd Webber seem like great art"--Newsday.) But he is a musical populist and proud of it. "Lyrics can be hard to grasp," he says. "If the music isn't comfortable on the ear and doesn't let the audience flow with it, you can miss a lot." Says Pimpernel producer Kathleen Raitt: "Nobody but the public loves his music...
Well, let's try. His shows, to be sure, seldom rise above pleasant kitsch. Jekyll & Hyde is a sluggish retelling of the famous horror tale with hair-flinging histrionics by star Robert Cuccioli; The Scarlet Pimpernel is so cheesily staged that the hero's main feat of derring-do is to pose as a plague victim so all the villains will flee in fear. Yet Wildhorn's music has enough muscle and melody to lift the material and the spirits. He can get our blood flowing with a rousing fight song (Into the Fire in Pimpernel) or brighten a brittle...
...kind of show that offers a continuous visual feast or a crescendo of visual achievement. It is heavy (and has to be) with information, pamphlets, books, press clippings, old exhibition catalogs. It comes up with some intensely interesting and little-known figures, such as Varian Fry, the Scarlet Pimpernel of cultural rescue, who after 1940 ran an emergency committee whose task, as he put it, was "to bring the political and intellectual refugees out of France before the Gestapo got them...I had no experience in refugee work, and none in underground work. But I accepted the assignment because...
Heaven lies far away, in California. It's called The Twilight of the Scarlet Pimpernel, a movie to be directed by Frank Capra. Purgatory is right at hand, in Buffalo, New York. It's where a pair of aging stage actors, George Hay (Philip Bosco) and his wife Charlotte (Carol Burnett), dream of starring in the Capra film. Instead, on this June day in 1953, they are reprising rundown performances of Cyrano and Private Lives. Payrolls are not being met, and their troupe is nearing mutiny...