Author's Note:

Sacre Bleu! This is one of my favourite scripts I've ever written.  It came about as I was on stage in one of our other shows standing next to Ken, who was the Director of the Panto, and we were doing a best of the musicals type show. The song we were singing was Seize the Day from Newsies, and it has a very rousing ending of "One for all and all for one!" and I made a comment about how it would be a great panto song, particularly if that panto was about the Three Musketeers. Ken immediately said, "If you write the Three Musketeers I'll direct it..." and the rest as they say was history.

The fantastic thing about the Three Musketeers is that if you are a society like us and have a lot of very talented older ladies who protest and say they are way too old and crusty to be a convincing Principal Boy, this is ideal for you. The older and more crusty the better! Our Three Musketeers got to have the best time because they are tongue in cheek comedy Principal boys. Each had a quirk to play on - Athos the sex god, Porthos, the strong food obsessive and Aramis the hot tempered genius and of course the classic Principal Boy, D'Artagnan. They even got a special Award for the Three Musketeers at the Somerset Fellowship of Drama's Cinderella Trophy Award.
Cardinal Richelieu (actually in fact his evil identical twin) was a fantastic fake TV evangelist type of  Villain who glided around on heeley boots and manipulated his way into everything and could talk/sing his way out of any corner. We had epic full swordfights up and down the auditorium, a running battle , a duel to the near death and all sorts of cameo's and shenanigans.

It's still responsible for me still shouting Sacre Bleu! when something astonishing happens - we didn't all talk in french accents as that would have been annoying for the audience, but every now and then we all had to shout that in unison and it stuck. It also looked great as a show and was a new enough story that the kids in the audience were rivetted.

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