THE THREE MUSKETEERS: I’M ENLISTING

by | Jan 24, 2025 | Review | 0 comments

Well, swash my buckles. That was a good time I didn’t see coming.

The Three Musketeers, I thought. Yay. Swordfighting, glamourized murder, general yo-ho butchness: not my things. I feared this production would be superficial and boring. But, as it turns out it’s superficial and fun.

The fun starts, of course, with Virginia writer Catherine Bush’s stage adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s 1844 novel, which is set in a flamboyant Paris in the early seventeenth century. Partly because of the playwright’s decision to flip from descriptions of past events into action-packed, fleshed-out scenes — to keep almost all the storytelling physical — this script moves like stink.

Plot, plot, plot, plot, plot. And stakes!

In the story, country youth D’Artagnan arrives in Paris, eager to become one of the musketeers in the King’s guard, and is immediately swept up in intrigue — and romance. Queen Anne is at odds with King Louis; D’Artagnan’s mentor Madame de Tréville, his three musketeer friends Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, and therefor D’Artagnan himself, are all on Queen Anne’s side — and she is dangerously, some would say traitorously, in love with the Duke of Buckingham, who’s running England. This crew is opposed by the King’s camp: the sinister Cardinal Richelieu, his eye-patched enforcer Rochefort, and Rochefort’s lover, the scheming Milady de Winter.

D’Artagnan falls head over heels for his landlord’s daughter Constance, who is one of Queen Anne’s personal servants and deeply entrenched in the intrigue.

Diamonds. The Bastille. Life-or-death swordfighting.

Aided by his team, director Daryl Cloran keeps things moving at a gale-force pace. During the swordfights, the enormous cast clambers over Cory Sincennes’s set, a giant, timbered jungle gym — as it revolves. The effect is spectacular. That’s thanks largely to fight director Jonathan Hawley Purvis’s work. In this production, Purvis offers the combat equivalent of enough choreography to fill a full-length musical: it’s complex, surprising, well executed, and, because there’s no gore and virtually no physical suffering, it’s a pleasure to accept as pure, boisterous storytelling.

Thematically, The Three Musketeers is essentially about male bonding, the love of comrades. Because the patriarchy has not treated me well as a gay man, I was surprised to find myself moved — sometimes thrilled — by that content in this production. When D’Artagnan and the musketeers pledge on their swords “To the death!”, I got goosebumps. When one of them suffered a tragic loss and the other three bowed their heads, I was moved by their silent solidarity.

Why did I react to militarized male camaraderie so differently in this telling? I guess it’s because I’m getting better at recognizing love between straight men these days without feeling excluded or threatened by it. And because The Three Musketeers is about honour — and heroism — which are in short supply.

Sincennes has also designed the costumes, so everybody looks fantastic: the musketeers in their leathery pantaloons, Queen Anne with her starburst coronet.

Among the performances, I found Daniel Fong’s D’Artagnan most engaging: innocent, accessible, balletically athletic. And, in an effectively restrained performance, Garrett Ross is unsettlingly intimidating as Rochefort. Although he delivers the basic goods, I thought Darren Martens could have explored Athos’s complexity more thoroughly. And I thought Felix LeBlanc’s take on the Duke of Buckingham was tipping towards cartoon.

But the sum is more than that. The acting ensemble is the body that gives life to this production, and that body is more than up to the job.

I was happy to be swept away.

THE THREE MUSKETEERS Adapted by Catherine Bush from the novel by Alexandre Dumas. Directed by Daryl Cloran. Co-produced by the Citadel Theatre and Arts Club Theatre. Running at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage until February 16. Tickets and information

PHOTO CREDIT: (Photo of Daniel Fong, Alexander Ariate, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, and Darren Martens by Moonrider Productions)

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