I grew up on movies like A Knight’s Tale, The Mummy, Pirates of the Caribbean, and The Princess Bride. Swashbuckling tales where dazzling swordplay is interspersed with winks and one-liners, and where star-crossed romance is balanced out by a side character more familiar with an open palm than a passionate embrace. I say the people trying to resurrect wooly mammoths have got it all wrong — this genre of ‘90s cinema is the extinct creature that’s worth spending millions to bring back from the dead.
If you’re a fellow millennial, I think you’ll agree. I also believe those who still own the aforementioned DVDs would do well to turn off their TVs and make haste to St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin, where a delightfully ragtag production of The Three Musketeers is delivering all the sword fighting, villainous hijinx, and surreptitious kisses that have been missing from your life since movies moved on, whether you’ve felt their absence or not.
As someone who clearly remembers watching Disney’s 1993 version of The Three Musketeers, with Oliver Platt (!), Kiefer Sutherland (!!), and Charlie Sheen (!!!), I obviously count myself in the former camp.
I should be clear that this play at St. Croix Festival Theatre, running through August 30, is specifically titled Ken Ludwig’s The Three Musketeers. It is a 2006 stage adaptation of the classic Alexandre Dumas novel, created by the playwright behind Lend Me a Tenor and book writer of Crazy for You, where Ludwig has indeed reworked Dumas’s tale in the ‘90s blockbuster vein. Here’s a taste: the play opens with a double entendre from d’Artagnan’s father about how a floppy feathered hat used to bounce up and down on him, or is he talking about his wife? If you think that’s crass, wait until you hear King Louis wax poetic about an upcoming masquerade.
Frequent punchlines aside, this is still the 17th-century adventure you probably know, from the original novel or one of the countless adaptations. Young d’Artagnan (played here by Evan Grande), the country son of a former Musketeer, heads to Paris to follow in his father’s footsteps. There, he falls in with Athos (Mary Margaret Hughes), Porthos (Christian Watts), and Aramis (Jaden Lily), three Musketeers who act as an elite fighting force for King Louis XIII (Jennifer Stone) and Queen Anne (Mikayla Keyes), but not before he gets on the wrong side of the king’s sinister adviser Cardinal Richelieu (Isaac Bont) and his henchman, the Comte de Rochefort (John Zach). Will the king’s men prevail, or will the cardinal’s scheming be the end of them and the current monarch?
You don’t go into a story like this, or at least an adaptation like this — where the cardinal is introduced by having his robe sliced by the Musketeers, exposing his polka-dot boxers — not knowing the heroes will win out in the end. Yet, there are plenty of delightful surprises that director Jesse March achieves despite setting himself the impossible task of capturing “the adventure romance and old world feel of an Errol Flynn movie,” as he notes in the program, on what was obviously a shoestring budget.
As you may have already noted from the actors’ names listed above, women take a much more commanding role in this production than may be expected. Does that mean there is less derring-do because Athos is played by Mary Margaret Hughes? On the contrary, Hughes commands the stage every time she struts across it in her leather armor, and steers the high-flying shenanigans back to the dramatic heart when Athos reveals (and confronts) his past. Well, does it mean there will be less passion because Aramis is played by Jaden Lily? Certainly not. Lily’s Aramis is well-versed in the romantic arts, yet still thrown for a loop by the (literally) drunk-in-love Sabine (Hannah Vath), d’Artagnan’s goofy but capable sister who tags along on his journey to Paris.
When I say capable, I mean Sabine knows her way around a rapier. So does d’Artagnan, which helps him quickly ingratiate himself with the Musketeers. But so do all 14 cast members in this Festival Theatre show. I must applaud Zach, the fight choreographer, and March, who has the double billing of director and assistant fight choreographer; the unit set is fairly nondescript (Walter Lab is the scenic designer, painter, and carpenter), basically two sets of stairs framing the stage both leading up to a central platform, but the nonstop action set atop, across, and around Lab’s sturdy structure is flabbergasting.
If memory serves, during one fight scene 13 of the 14 actors are onstage brandishing swords, daggers, and muskets in a no-holds-barred maelstrom made even more thrilling thanks to the tight quarters of the Historic Auditorium’s small stage. There are enough thrusts, leaps, and flying steel here to fill the Guthrie’s sprawling thrust stage.
Every action-adventure tale needs moments of sincere gravity, and thankfully March is more than up to the task for those scenes, too. After Iz Walsh (who plays the queen’s attendant, Constance) and Lily Alice Linz (Milady, an agent of the cardinal) wring every last drop out of a climactic scene, March cements the moment for the audience by slowing this whizzing arrow of a show down to a slow-rolling fog. You may leave the theater wondering less how they fit all those combatants on that puny set than how Festival Theatre managed to bring this wealth of acting talent to a town of 2,400. I certainly did.
I also left for the hour-long drive back to Minneapolis with a few other questions on my mind. Why did Ludwig leave so much lazy dialogue in, like when Athos points a gun during a tense scene and says, in the 1600s mind you, “I’ll blow your brains out”? Why didn’t someone tell Grande that d’Artagnan would be a much more convincing youngster if he was clean shaven? And why does it feel like this is an abridged version instead of the full play? (Hold tight on that last one, I might ask March.)
St. Croix Festival Theatre’s Three Musketeers is sort of like d’Artagnan himself. It’s a show well outside the big city. On its face, it’s a modest affair. But give it a chance, and you’ll be thanking the stars you did.
Oh, and round up your fellow adventure-comedy-romance fans and bring them along with you — this is one show that, like those ‘90s movies I mentioned, would be a whole different, uproarious experience with a packed theater. I hope they can fill up the rest of the short run. This well-armed cast deserves it.
Full Transparency: I received a free ticket to The Three Musketeers.
Ken Ludwig’s The Three Musketeers
St. Croix Festival Theatre
The Historic Auditorium
210 N. Washington St.
St. Croix Falls, WI 54024
August 13th – 30th
Read more and buy tickets here
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