31 March 1999

Part Three of Eight. Back to Part Two...

NR: I'm sure. Then, how did you get the book?

NK: We went through a series of book writers. For one reason or another it would never work out. For example, Arthur Kopit was certainly there for a long time but had a certain parting of the ways with the producers and left after about eight months or so, by which time Frank and I had already done a demo tape. We were just zooming along. And then we had a series of book writers, most of whom only went so far as doing a treatment or an outline or something like that, and there would always be a problem. The project kind of came to a crashing halt. By this time we had actually done the concept album. That was in 1991. We recorded that down in Miami and it was a real oddity because we had no book writer, we had no book, we had no show but we had these songs. So, the project just kept floating on. About every four months we'd get a call from the Nederlander offices saying, "Well, we're going to all have dinner and meet this new potential director or this new potential book writer" and it would just never work out.

In the summer of '93, one weekend I was totally pulling my hair out and I said, "I'm just going to do this." Nobody asked me to do it and nobody knew I was doing it. I just sat down with a couple of yellow pads and literally over the course of a weekend, I wrote this book. I think part of the reason I did it so fast was because I'd been living with these characters in my head and the songs for so many years now that it just all came flowing out. I wrote it and I thought it was pretty good. I did a little bit of rewriting, typed it up, and showed it to two people, my husband and to Frank. They both really liked it and they had one or two suggestions. I did a few changes in the computer and then we had this draft by the fall of '93 and we switched producers because our option with those producers had run out. Suddenly Pierre Cossette was interested. Kathy Raitt, who had been working with Jimmy Nederlander was also a friend of Pierre Cossette's. She had seen the new script and she had a copy of the album. She gave the script to Pierre and he loved it. Then he listened to the album and he loved that. The next thing you know I was having lunch with Pierre Cossette and he was saying, "I want to do this thing." It still took a year and a half after that to really get the ball rolling. Finally it became clear that we were really going to do this and we started doing little workshops. My dear friend Nick Corley came in to direct. He wasn't my dear friend then, I didn't know him, but he's become one of my closest friends. He directed several of these workshops and we had really good response. Then in February of '97 I got a call from Kathy Raitt saying, "We have the Minskoff Theatre." Then I was panic-stricken for three weeks. It was like going underground. It was like hibernating for three weeks because it was...I guess it was terror. For three weeks I was just paralyzed at the realization that this thing was really going to happen. Then, from then on in, I was too busy to even think about it and I got more and more excited.

NR: How difficult was it to take a turn of the century novel and make it into something that a modern audience would enjoy?

NK: I loved that challenge and I think working with Frank made that a very natural process too. You must remember with each song that I wrote I was given the music first, so I was always adapting my lyrics to a kind of twentieth century sensibility, and trying to make sure that they also stayed applicable at least in one dimension to France and England in 1794.

NR: You had to cut some characters, like Sir Andrew and Suzanne. Also, Marguerite and Chauvelin are not lovers in the book.

NK: I changed an enormous amount. The book is really told from Marguerite's point of view. Although I wanted to keep her as extremely central, I wanted to tell it more from Percy's point of view. The book is often very passive and I wanted it to be much more active. I wanted to see these guys doing a rescue. I wanted to see how Percy becomes the Pimpernel.

NR: That's true. That's not really in there.

NK: No, the book begins and he's already the Pimpernel and he's already in this estranged marriage and I just felt like, "Let's let people see. Why do they get estranged? What goes wrong? How does he become the Pimpernel?" To me it made sense that his disillusionment with her would be something that would catapult him into it. The "Chauvelin decision" - it's in the book. I really think if Baroness Orczy was writing that novel today she would have made the same choice I did, because every time Chauvelin in the book is with Marguerite, all the language is very sensual every time the two of them are together. So, for me it was a small leap to say that they had been lovers.

Then I also wanted it to be funnier than the book because to me the book had its wonderful witty moments, but it always stayed within certain very staid parameters and I felt that it had marvelous opportunities to be funny - to show these guys exaggerating themselves into fops and to really take that Prince of Wales character and to have some fun with him. Also, I just love writing comedy. I don't think there was any way that I could have done it without making it funny. It just came naturally.

NR: I'm very glad you did! I love the funny parts. I think that's what makes us come back.

NK: I can't write anything without...I'm writing a murder mystery right now and I'm literally having to fight these characters to not be funny all the time, because I want it to be scary and funny. That's the kind of thing I love to see. I want that combination, but my first couple of drafts were going perilously close to farce because these characters just kept being farcical. So, I'm reining them back in so that they can still be funny but so that I can still have this tension and suspense. So, yeah, I wanted it to be a lot more funny, a lot more active, and I wanted it to be very sensual and sexy. That decision had a lot to do with Frank and me, because Frank would give me music that was sensual and for me it was very natural to write lyrics that were sensual. Since a lot of that came first, it was very natural when I wrote the book to then go into that territory and to sensualize the story. Also, Marguerite is a very sensual character and one wants to take advantage of that and really let her fly with it.

On to Part Four...