Looking for soul: 'The Scarlet Pimpernel,''Triumph of Love,' & 'Gross Indecency.' (musical review)

About the French Revolution, Charles Dickens remarked that it is "a wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other." Human inscrutability, arguably, gives A Tale of Two Cities its power, allowing the book to illustrate, but never truly to explain, how one person can voluntarily suffer the guillotine, another send him there, and a third watch the bloodshed while knitting.

Comparable wonder and horror imbue the opening seconds of a new Broadway musical about the French Revolution. In the first scene of The Scarlet Pimpernel, a murky light plays over a dungeon packed with tearful aristocrats. After a moment, the dungeon's walls part and swivel to reveal a Parisian square dominated by a guillotine, the focus of a dozen capering sans-culottes. As the revolutionaries open their mouths to sing, the sinister plunges to the ridiculous.

Unintentional comedy is the shoal around which all musicals tack. We need good reason to accept humans caroling at the drop of a hat, and The Scarlet Pimpernel, with an easy-listening score by Frank Wildhorn and inane book and lyrics by Nan Knighton, doesn't give us any. Lines like "we are cut from the same surly star/like two jewels in the sky sharing fire," recall Beaumarchais's dictum that "What is too stupid to say, must be sung."

More curious, though, is the farcical humor that makes the show deviate sharply from Baroness Orczy's original novel. This Pimpernel's band of Englishmen do not divert suspicion by pretending to be bumbling fops as they steal victims from the Terror: they really are bumbling fops, who have taken a crash course in French and who flaunt Christmas-pantomime disguises in enemy territory. The climactic confrontation between the Pimpernel (played with zealous effeminacy by Douglas Sills) and the sanguinary French mastermind Chauvelin (a sullen Terrence Mann) involves a burlesque fencing match, a basket of bloody heads, and the completely gratuitous introduction of Madame Tussaud.

Even the immortal humorist Dickens slacked on the comedy when it came to the French Revolution: Why has this Broadway team played it for laughs? Certainly some of the scenes - "The Creation of Man" chorus, for example, with the mincing Prince of Wales (David Cromwell) - are genuinely funny, and it is almost a relief that the production doesn't take itself seriously. But the camp style makes the whole enterprise unnervingly self-conscious - everyone, including the audience, knows there's kitsch on the stage. And everyone celebrates it.

Perhaps the clowning reflects musical comedy's vaudeville heritage. Or perhaps it is covering up for something else. The philosopher Henri Bergson speculated that we laugh at "automatism and inelasticity" in human life: at people operating on auto pilot, without thought - behaving like bumbling fops, for instance. We laugh because we recognize the same reflexes within ourselves; the other person is not, after all, in Dickens's words, a secret and a mystery.

Farce may be serving as a shield for The Scarlet Pimpernel: Recognizing ourselves in the buffoons on stage, we're meant to disregard the absence of coherent story, eloquent music, or character. We're meant to overlook the fact that, after the opening Gothic gloom, this play really contains no secret and no mystery at all

Lack of substance is not a failing of Triumph of Love, another new blockbuster musical with a tenuous connection to eighteenth-century France. Based on Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux's comedy of 1732, with music by Jeffrey Stock, a book by James Magruder, and lyrics by Susan Birkenhead, the production boasts Betty Buckley as the sour spinster Hesione, and F. Murray Abraham as her philosopher-brother Hermocrates.

Imbroglios and scenes of cross-dressing yield plenty of scope for slapstick, but ideas, literate banter, and even mock semiotics ballast the foolery. Is love worth more than philosophy? Does too much contemplation cramp the human spirit? How about "trigonometric science and the meaning of meaning," Hermocrates' favorite course of study? Triumph of Love sports with these questions, its elegantly choreographed confusion spinning exceptional performers into the spotlight, one after another: Buckley crooning a spectacularly husky ballad, or the Harlequin (Roger Bart) capering through the pool-table-green garden that constitutes the set.

With its frolicking commedia dell'arte clowns, the comedy in Triumph of Love has a sterling pedigree - mostly. Also in abundance are wacky quips ("Yes, your blond and tallness," the Harlequin yelps to his master Agis, played by the blond and tall Christopher Sieber), injokes (a dance pose that alludes to the current Broadway revival of The King and I), and lyrics that rhyme "rotten" with "days-old peas au-gratin." In places, too, this show resorts to the camp humor that characterizes The Scarlet Pimpernel; as a culminating witticism, Abraham slinks onto the stage in silks and satins - Louis Quatorze meets Priscilla Queen of the Desert.

Playfulness, catchy songs, and champion performances don't, finally, add up to soul. One is left with the suspicion that the play's creators concerned themselves more with ingredients - bigname stars, a high-concept book - than with overall vision. And in case the recipe does not please, why not add a few extra laughs? Viewers not satisfied with the cast's charisma, or with a few knock-out numbers flavored with global dance rhythms, may at least appreciate Betty Buckley in Marie Antoinette hairdo, complete with toy boat.

The ploy doesn't quite succeed: ultimately, Triumph of Love is easy to admire, but hard to love, recalling Bergson's theory that "the comic demands ... a momentary anesthesia of the heart."

The shield of comedy can buckle at the wrong moment, a fact poignantly expressed in a play that is threatening to become a modern classic. Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, by Moises Kaufman, was hailed by the critics when it opened last February; in addition to the now long-playing New York production, a second cast has just opened in San Francisco. Juggling several roles apiece, nine actors animate a script that Kaufman compiled - brilliantly - from trial transcripts, press accounts, and books by and about one of the nineteenth century's greatest wits. Constant references to textual sources and the juxtaposition of contradictory accounts, emphasized by the use of old volumes as props, make Gross Indecency more than a portrait of one unfortunate writer: the play shows how we all fabricate stories to explain, and dismiss, reality.

Much of the script pits the progressively traumatized Wilde (Edward Hibbert in New York; the original star, Michael Emerson, now in San Francisco) against stuffy bewigged prosecutors who hurl at him quotations from his own writing. A master of repartee, Wilde easily evades at first, but eventually, in the momentum of his own ripostes, he falls into a trap. "Oh dear, no," he replies when asked if he kissed a certain servant. "He was a peculiarly plain boy."

Instantly the prosecution, seizing the advantage, begins the onslaught that will end in the author's disgrace and imprisonment. With a single plaisanterie, it seems to the audience, Wilde has sealed his own fate. A fissure opens up in the surface of comedy, and we understand the painful, lonely apartness that makes each human being a secret and a mystery to all others.