Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Much as your average musical's book is just an excuse for letting go with lots of song and dance, Dumas' bizarrely complicated plot is just an excuse for action and dueling and general running about. Although the king himself, at the urging of the insidious Richelieu, has outlawed the duel, his gallant musketeers still try to work through worn-out codes of loyalty and honor, something that the Cardinal's guards don't share. As a result, every duel devolves into chaos and confusion. And also a good deal of fun. Hamlin's actors seem to have jumped into...
Meanwhile, one of her ladies-in-waiting has written to D'Artagnan, "I have been abducted again," and, with that, the plot's whole creaky machinery is set in motion. Timothy Carden is D'Artagnan, the would-be fourth musketeer; to him falls the task of combining many of the disparate elements of the play. As the busiest actor on stage, Carden is called upon to handle battles, brawls, and bedroom scenes and does so winningly with his usual blend of physical energy and ingenuous geniality. He provides the driving force that sets the other three musketeers-Michael Smith...
...Only at the beginning of the second act does a quick sequence of vignettes suggest the texture of a complex, "historical" moment wherein a half-dozen events are existing almost simultaneously. The rest of the time we're all too aware of watching the lineal working out of a Plot...
Ostensibly Dumas is out to prove, particularly through the doomed Athos, that we must love with more head and less heart, but the melo-romantic-dramatic plot will have none of it. And while much of the musketeers' raison d' etre pretends to be the protection of female honor, the play actually shunts its women aside in favor of its male camaraderie. In fact, much of the second half of The Three Musketeers directs its anger not at the scheming Richelieu or the irresponsible Louis or the decaying monarchy that protects the two, but at Richelieu's agent Milady...
...coming across on THVN newscasts, which are unaccountably aired with tunes like Mrs. Robinson and Love Is Blue as background music. Actors, too, find scant opportunity to shine in THVN's ersatz soap operas and sitcoms, which are long on doctrine and all too short on drama. Typical plot: North Vietnamese saboteur infiltrates the South, discovers that life under the Saigon government is not as bad as Hanoi has made it out to be, defects...