Sword fights, adventures and kinship: New stage adaptation of ‘The Three Musketeers’ comes to Hampton
Swashbuckling action is coming to Hampton.
The Acting Company will perform its adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ classic novel “The Three Musketeers” at The American Theatre.
The action-adventure story will include plenty of swordplay. This stage version is also being billed as a spectacle of “dynamic staging and really exciting costuming” by its director, Kent Gash.
“It is a blend of both period and contemporary ideas,” Gash said.
Like many of the movie adaptations of “The Three Musketeers,” the staged story follows the young, cocksure, sword-toting D’Artagnan on his quest to join the king of France’s most elite unit, the musketeers.
D’Artagnan arrives in Paris, where he bumps into — and ultimately befriends — the big three themselves: Aramis, Athos and Porthos.
The trio becomes a quartet.
Later in the play, they defend one another and the honor of France as they navigate the doings of the villainous Milady de Winter — “who is, of course, the delicious female creation in the story that is really one of the great emergences, one of the great villains of all time,” Gash said.
The play deviates from the classic retelling in that it includes Dumas as a character.
“Dumas wrote this story as a reclamation of his father’s legacy,” Gash said.
Dumas’ father, Gen. Alexandre Dumas, was of Haitian descent and the highest-ranking person of color in a Western military during his lifetime.
“There was some underhanded business that ultimately landed Dumas’ father in jail,” Gash explained.
The play sheds light on the belief of certain contemporary historians that Dumas’ imprisonment was orchestrated by Napoleon Bonaparte, the general who ruled France as emperor in the early 1800s and took credit for some of Dumas’ accomplishments, according to Gash.
Although not a musical, the show incorporates song and dance as well as spoken word and poetry.
Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8138, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com
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If you go
When: 8 p.m. Friday
Where: 125 E. Mellen St., Hampton
Tickets: Start at $35
Details: hamptonarts.org
