NR: Shari, how did you find the show?

SP: I read the book a long time ago and I loved it. Then I saw Chuck Wagner in Les Misérables and I loved him. So, I got the concept album as soon as I could and have followed this show ever since. I was overjoyed to see it come to Broadway. It was my favorite story. I was hoping it would be my favorite performer (Chuck), but that didn't happen. At least he has been involved and that's good enough for me.

NR: When did you start "Sir Percy's Place?"

SP: During October of 1997 before I went to see the show.

NR: Really?

SP: Yeah. Well, I knew I was going to like it. It was first on my personal site, which has since withered and died because I don't care about it now that I have "Sir Percy's Place." Right after I came back from seeing the show I made it a separate site.

NR: That's almost two years now. How much time do you estimate that you spend on it?

SP: Oh, that would be frightening. (general laughter from everyone) There have been times that I have spent twelve hours out of a day on it.

KH: She is like "Speedy Gonzales." She had all this stuff up and I was still staring at my monitor - I haven't done anything from Pimpernel 3 yet on my site and she has everything.

SP: That's because I'm home for the summer and I've been bored. I've just sat on my computer all day and thought, "Hmm, what can I add now?"

NR: You do it in spurts, don't you?

SP: I tend to. When I'm at school or doing a lot of theater, it's harder for me to stay updated, especially when the show's in the middle of a run. Whenever something big was happening, like the opening of SP2, or now SP3, I get really into it and do a lot of updating. I've spent a lot of time on it.

NR: Peter, you found Pimpernel through Jekyll & Hyde, right?

PW: Yes. I was introduced to Frank's music by a friend. I heard Jekyll & Hyde first and then the same friend gave me the Pimpernel Concept Recording with Chuck and Linda (Eder). I had just been through a very rough break-up and for a period of about a month, every night, in order to fall asleep, I would listen to the song "Home Again." That would allow me to clear my mind and fall asleep. Like Jekyll & Hyde, I really loved the music and became a big fan of Linda and Frank. I think I started my unofficial site (I didn't really have a name for it) right around two weeks after Shari did. We were chatting on the Playbill Online Message Board at that point, along with a couple others, and then we started working on the League email list around December, 1997. Shari and I just started saying to each other that we should start a mailing list similar to the one that Jekyll & Hyde had.

SP: The Playbill Online board changed its format and it became almost unusable. We didn't want to lose this sort of family feeling that we'd gotten...

PW: ...Um hm. That was on the increase. There was a growing group of fans there.

NR: I remember being on the Jekyll & Hyde list at that time and there were more people talking about Pimpernel than Jekyll & Hyde, so they kind of said, "Guys, go start your own list." I thought that was around February.

KH: I thought that too.

SP: No, we were started by January, but it took us about a month to get everything ironed out and the list working correctly. We opened it sometime in January of `98.

NR: Do you remember how many members there were in the beginning?

SP: The first week we probably got about 15 or 20.

PW: That sounds about right.

KH: I joined in the second or third week of February and it was about 30 or 35. We all knew each other then.

NR: How many people are there now?

SP: The last time I checked it was over 590.

NR: OK, back to how I found the show. I had seen Jekyll and Hyde first. Actually, I didn't really know anything about Frank Wildhorn at the time, but I knew something about someone named Bob Cuccioli because my husband and I went to college with him. The three of us were in this really bad little glee club. At the time, Bob was a really nice guy with a nice voice. I remember he was a finance major. If there was a male solo, either Bob or my husband would get it, but that was it. Several years later, we happened to stumble on his name in a newspaper listing the cast of And the World Goes Round and we said, "Gee. Could that be the same Bob Cuccioli we went to school with?" and both of us said, "NAH!" But, lo and behold, it was. We were pretty excited that somebody that we knew was going to star on Broadway, so we were going to see the show no matter what it was. We got the concept CD and we really enjoyed it. We went to see Bob and thought the show was wonderful. He had grown tremendously in those twenty years and we were extremely impressed.

For Christmas, Kid's Night was coming up, and I got my daughter tickets for Jekyll & Hyde, which she was really excited about, and just for the heck of it, because it was a Wildhorn show, I bought tickets for all four of us to see The Scarlet Pimpernel. We didn't know anything about it, but we dearly loved it, even more so than Jekyll & Hyde. I enjoyed Jekyll, and I especially enjoyed seeing Bob, but it's such a different show. To me, it's so heart-breaking that I find it hard to see often. I like happy endings. I joined the League right around the same time and discovered really nice people so I stayed.

Interview conducted by Nancy Rosati.