Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers seems as though it has always been with us. I remember being given an abridged copy of the story when I was six or seven years old. I was a fiendish reader with a voracious appetite for adventure, so my parents kept the books flowing nonstop! My apartment and offices are currently overflowing with books for research, pleasure, and relaxation. My parents also shared with me that the author of this classic was a Black man. Naturally as I read the story, I imagined everyone in it looked like my extended family and me. Black. Imagine my surprise when every film version I saw, from the Gene Kelly, Lana Turner, MGM technicolor extravaganza, to the seminal Richard Lester films of the 1970s to the 2014 BBC series rich with detail and fashion-forward design, and a mixed-race actor as Porthos, yet Treville’s mighty musketeers were mostly “melanin challenged.” I was gobsmacked. How could we separate the origin of the classic story from its Blackness when the novel was written as a reclamation of his Father’s legacy? At least the short-lived 1984 Broadway revival of the Rudolf Friml/PG Wodehouse operetta featured the legendary Black actor Ron Taylor (the original Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors) as Porthos for its 8 performances. These gestures never matched the story I imagined as a child. An adventure full of people who looked like me!
Fast forward to 2021. The Acting Company is emerging from the pandemic and returning to production of its National Repertory tour. Friend, colleague, and Artistic director Ian Belknap asks me to direct The Three Musketeers and we begin to discuss a new adaptation, inspired in part by the award-winning biography of Alexander Dumas, The Black Count, by Tom Reiss. Ian and I decide to commission Obie Award–winning playwright, composer, and lyricist Kirsten Childs to create a new adaptation that centers Alexander Dumas and inextricably links the story to its originating Black imagination. Not long after the commission, Ian Belknap stepped down and I was named the Artistic Director of the Acting Company. Kirsten Childs’s thoughtful, outrageous, and daring adaptation marked the return to touring in rep for The Acting Co and is completing its first production in mid-March, as we create a totally new production just for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Kirsten Childs’s unique adaptation draws inspiration in part from an astonishing secret—that Dumas’s father, General Alex Dumas, was the highest-ranking person of Color in a Western military until our own time. Ms. Childs’s adaptation sheds new light on this swashbuckling adventure, giving the familiar favorite new resonance. The Three Musketeers is a reminder to all that courage, honesty, and valor can change the world. The adaptation freely deploys verse, contemporary vernacular language, hip-hop, Rap, dance, music, and swordplay! Is this the origin of Urban contemporary swagger and style?
This production will be both familiar and surprising! A raucous, dynamic, visceral, and exciting production where then meets now—boys eventually become men—loyalty, honor, and honesty are ascending values, and we are all finally responsible for each other. It’s a classic romantic adventure story. A story we may think we know can still surprise and delight in new ways. We aspire to share a Three Musketeers that celebrates what we’ve always loved in this classic, while we simultaneously reclaim it as a joyful masterwork of the African Diaspora.
Join us in the celebration!
FORWARD! WE GO FORWARD!
—Kent Gash