All For One And One For All!
How one West Coast musical theater house conceptualized an original work based on a Dumas classic.
By Bonnie Weiss
Issue: June/July 2001

Planchet (Christian Borle) takes the stage in The 3hree Musketeers.
The American Musical Theatre of San Jose, one of the country’s most respected and successful community theaters (see December SD 2000), recently took on a daunting project. From June of 2000 through this past March, they had been developing and workshopping a new musical based on Alexander Dumas’ classic novel, The 3hree Musketeers. (The unique spelling was created by program designer Rick Tharp). The musical made its American premiere in AMTSJ’s 2,665-seat theatre on March 9th and ran for two weeks.

The 3hree Musketeers was created by three British artists: composer George Stiles (who had previously won an Olivier Award for his musical Honk ), Paul Leigh (who wrote the lyrics for the British stage musical Notre Dame) and librettist Peter Raby, who had created a previous stage adaptation of The Three Musketeers for Canada’s Shakespearean Festival Theatre. Stiles, Leigh and Raby continued to develop their musical treatment from 1991 to 1995. In 1996, their Musketeers placed second in the International Competition for Best Musical, held in Denmark. American composer Craig Boemer, whose Enter The Guardsman took first place at the competition, was so impressed with Musketeers, he sent a videotape of a concert version of the show to his friend and colleague, Dianna Shuster, AMTSJ’s artistic director. Though much of the score was sung in Danish, Shuster loved the music. She asked her associate, Mark Jacobs, to track down the composer, who upon request, sent them the full script and score.


Constance (Sutton Foster) and D’Artagnan (Jim Stanek) get close in a scene from The 3hree Musketeers, which was recently given its national premiere by American Musical Theatre of San Jose.
Shuster and Jacobs then brought the show (with Jacob’s approved edits) to the theater’s Executive Producer Stewart Slater. He agreed to have AMTSJ sponsor a staged reading of Musketeers at the National Alliance of Music Theatre’s annual New Works Festival in November 1999. After this staged reading it became apparent to Slater that the show had potential because respected people in the business were requesting he keep them apprised of the show’s progress.

Shortly after the reading, Jacobs and Shuster flew to Switzerland to view a fully staged production of the show presented by The Swiss Opera Company. Despite some flaws, the show’s potential was strong enough for Shuster and Jacobs to launch a fundraising campaign to raise the $150,000 needed to create an extended workshop.

The campaign was successful and last June, the entire creative team assembled in San Jose to rehearse and try out new material. Invited audiences, comprised of season subscribers, donors and theater colleagues, were asked to view the show on three different weekends. These performances were staged in a classroom setting, with minimal scenery and only a piano for accompaniment.

The test audiences were instructed not to critique the performances, but to focus on what they did not understand about the production. “With such a complex story and so many characters, scenes and plot developments,” says Shuster, “we wanted to make sure they truly got all that was going on.” Acting on some of this feedback, Shuster moved the intermission to an earlier point in the show, re-arranged the order of the scenes, cut a chorus number and replaced the show’s original jovial ending with a soulful, philosophical solo performed by D’Artagnan.


The Milady de Winter (Rachel deBenedet) shares a moment with Rochefort (Jonathan Rhys Williams) in The 3hree Musketeers.
Although this is the third time in the company’s 65-year history that AMTSJ has played a part in the development of a new musical, The 3hree Musketeers proves to be its most demanding. “The piece is an enormous challenge logistically,” says Shuster. “It calls for 12 scenes with 30 different locations. We have characters dashing across France on horse, crossing the English Channel in a boat, and scenes that require multiple settings with actors simultaneously appearing onstage from different locations. It was a major staging challenge.”

One ingenious bit of staging, costuming and set design came out of this very challenge. How was Shuster to depict the musketeers travelling through France on horses? Real animals were out of the question. She decided to use human actors who were costumed to morph into horses when they bent over. She then decided to have other actors, clothed in similarly creative ways, transform into trees, columns, a boat and other inanimate objects. “The horse problem actually became my doorway into an entire visual language for the piece,” explains Shuster. Out of this came her idea for a pre-show, mini-circus with cast members portraying tumblers and clowns, who bring audience members onstage to engage in a series of comedic Cirque du Soleil style shenanigans.

AMTSJ has big plans for Musketeers. In the hope of finding producing partners to launch a cross-country tour, they invited people from all over the U.S. with similar sized venues to view the production. What’s more, at the end of its March premiere run, the cast assembled in a recording studio to make a 70-minute original cast CD of the show’s highlights. The CD will include song lyrics and production photos.

“We know this is still a work in progress,” says Shuster. “We still need to pare down the story. It’s too dense, with too many plot lines about too many characters. But it has enormous audience appeal—romance, excitement, adventure. The score is wonderful. The lyrics are clever, and the music is sweeping...breathtaking. I bet there are six or seven songs that will make people’s hearts come to their throats.”

To find out more about The 3hree Musketeers, contact American Musical Theatre of San Jose, call 800-455-7468 or log on at http://www.amtsj.org.

Hot Tips On Creating New Musicals
For small to medium sized community or regional theaters wishing to develop new musical works, Dianna Shuster offers the following advice:

* “Plan well: Come into the project with a list of concerns that will need to be addressed and possible solutions in advance.”

*“Get the production in front of an audience as soon as possible. Then do re-writes and changes based on how it plays before these groups.” (Shuster wishes to make clear that she is not suggesting that the creative team should act by committee, nor that they should cater to a specific audience demographic for commercial purposes. Rather, the workshop performances should be geared to finding out what needs clarification; what works dramatically and what doesn’t.)

* “Build a trusting environment in which all minds work collectively on problem-solving for everyone. Be willing to hear and respectfully consider ideas from all involved—writers, performers, designers. Otherwise, you risk the creative team breaking apart and becoming a group of individuals with ego-driven motives. It’s especially important to convey to the composer, lyricist and librettist that you, as the director, want to serve the piece, and not your individual career. Our production owes much of its growth and success to this very spirit of cooperation.” sd


Bonnie Weiss is a musical theater reviewer, historian and educator.