“Remove your shoes,” Mark Chavez deadpans at the start of the Pajama Men’s show 2 Man 3 Musketeers. “We’re going to knock your socks off.” That’s one of several tongue-in-cheek introductory boasts, which would be funny enough even if they weren’t wholly borne out by this fantastic 60-minute Alexandre Dumas knock-off. In Edinburgh last year, I struggled with the show, which seemed narratively unclear and overpowered by Shenoah Allen’s grotesque Cardinal Richelieu. Maybe they had a bad night, maybe I was in bad humour – or maybe the show has scrubbed up considerably in the year since. Because now, at the start of a UK tour, it’s a real treat.
It’s the Albuquerque duo’s first adaptation, but the style is true to the self-penned, semi-improvised, multi-character playlets that made their name. Beginning with D’Artagnan’s departure from his childhood home (“I don’t want to spend my life on an avant garde farm”), the story unfolds in fluid, permeable sketches, as Chavez and Allen transform themselves instantaneously from lecherous dukes to obese cardinals (toned down, but still memorably glutinous), from a centaur called Tony to teenagers performing a high-school play. Dumas purists be warned: the Pajama Men don’t so much adapt the novel as pickle it in their own loopy imaginations.
They also never let the source material stand in the way of a promising tangent. Symptomatic is the sequence when the lights dim around Chavez’s stricken Athos, who begins to narrate his tragic backstory. At his mention of a full moon, D’Artagnan butts in to gibber about werewolves, and the scene devolves into an argument about the existence or otherwise of mythical beasts.
You could argue it’s a fault that the pair don’t take their story very seriously. There’s no real sense of why they’ve chosen to tell this story now, nor of a denouement when the story reaches its climax. But it’s well enough told that we want to know what happens next, and there is enough of a structure on which the pair’s free-associating sketches can hang. And these are the real meat of the evening: the scene where they self-consciously populate a 17th-century marketplace (“so many different characters!”) or where the queen makes lady-in-waiting Constance queasy with sex talk; or indeed the cutaways to squabbling Statler and Waldorf-alikes Diane and Nadine in the front row.
Often, we’re laughing at the evident pleasure Chavez and Allen take in the enterprise. They ad-lib frequently but not self-indulgently, and the ad-libs arise from the close care and attention paid to what each of them is saying and doing. And to the live contributions from multi-instrumentalist Ignacio Agrimbau, to whose music a very funny seafaring song is sung. “Should we be taking on this much water? / “I don’t know, man – is this your otter?” As ever, the twosome work together like a dream, and without a trace of ego. All for one, indeed, in a show that’s very much one for all.
