Alexandre Dumas' the Three Musketeers: An Adaptation for the Stage

by Charles Morey

The ingenious new stage adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas classic that has been a smash hit in professional theatres from coast to coast.

210 pages, Paperback

First published January 13, 2002

About the author

See also:

Charles Rufus Morey, author of Christian Art
Charles William Morey, author of Higher Arithmetic

Reviews

[Stuart · Rating 2 out of 5]

Morey's adaptation of THE THREE MUSKETEERS is very fast paced and whips through the action of the novel with fairly minimal cuts in regards to characters or events, but between its harried pace and rather clunky meta-narrative of having Dumas appear as a character, it fails to do justice to the source material, with characters often feeling flat and barely given any time to develop. This results in a lot of tonal dissonance, especially as the story builds to its bloody climax, and with the adaptor's decision to include a scene where Dumas sexes up his secretary, one can't help but read a rather sexist agenda at work in the text, especially when the most prominent female character is a hell-bitch murderess on a rampage, and every other woman presented is a victim or ineffectual. Though there are moments of fun and swashbuckling action, they often feel forced or wedged in via the meta-narrator device, which also doesn't work since it begs the question why the story needs must end so sadly, when the narrator himself so clearly has the option to change it at his whim. A question that could have been very interesting, by the way, but is one more thing that the play never takes a moment to catch it's breath and pose. The result is a very large, probably very difficult to stage production that ultimately lacks much in the way of soul or depth and therefore feels like it would be a lot of effort for very little reward.