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Theatre Reviews
2007 –
2008
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January 2008
The 39
Steps
With wit, romance, and four high-powered actors, The
Thirty Nine Steps transfers Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 film live to the
Roundtable's American Airlines Theatre.
The play is a
hand-in-glove connection to the film, breeziness
overtaking the espionage thriller aspect, but who cares? If you did not see the film, you can
still enjoy the play and its madcap dexterity. Familiarity with classic 1930's spy
flicks is helpful, but at the core, the current production is a non-stop action
spoof, and it works with only a few sluggish spots.
In his adaptation of the film,
Patrick Barlow inserted many of the familiar amusing lines. The characters bear resemblance to the
film's Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll, Hitchcock's original blonde. Hannay (Charles Edwards) is a suave chap
with a trim mustache, a pipe, an arched eyebrow, and one night he is in a
quandary, thinking of something
utterly trivial and thoroughly mindless to
do.
"Eureka!" he says. "I'll go to the
theatre."
While he is at the music hall,
shots ring out and Annabella
Schmidt (Jennifer Ferrin), an exotic stranger from a Teutonic
country, approaches him.
"Will you take me home with
you?" she pleads. Always a gentleman, Hannay takes her to
his West End flat where she tells that "the thirty-nine steps" is trying to
smuggle military secrets out of England.
A moment to clarify. "The thirty-nine steps," an enemy spy ring, is the film's MacGuffin, Hitchcock's central gimmick that the story revolves around, intended only to keep the action going.
It is not a good visit for the
German beauty, who ends up with a knife in her back, whispering to Hannay, "Alt na Shellach!" Hannay is now entangled in an
international crisis. The police
suspect he is the murderer, and they set off after him. Hannay heads for Scotland, trying to
find "Alt na Shellach,"
capture the smugglers, and clear his name. He runs into a
series of near misses with suspicious, dangerous spies, and threatening police.
There is a chase across the top of Scotland's Flying Scotsman, a near death stop in a Scottish farmhouse, an Edinbugh bridge, the highlands and a return to England. The story is
full of Hitchcockian references, obvious and obscure, including a silhouette montage of future Hitchcock films, The Birds, North by Northwest, Psycho, and Strangers on a Train, even the obligatory Hitchcock cameo. Mingled with the bedlam is always wit and romance.
Most intriguing: The 40-plus characters are all depicted by four actors. Only Charles Edwards from the London production portrays just one character, Richard Hannay, always dapper in the same tweed, three-piece suit. Edwards lends him a Robert Donat-type self-confidence, balancing between apprehension and vanity. Jennifer Ferrin plays three
women, each distinctive, the glamorous German, the dowdy farmer's wife, the not-at-all-naïve Hitchcock blonde. The dozens of other characters, police and enemy, grim Scots and churlish Cockneys, are portrayed by two energetic actors, Arnie Burton and Cliff Saunders, often with zany accessory changes. At one point, Burton plays two characters at
one time, and Saunders is a winner as Mr. Memory, an entertainer who can answer anything.
From London, director Maria
Aitken, with Toby Sedgwick and Christopher Bayes'
character choreography, keeps the action frenetic and inventive, using mime,
stepladders,
window and door frames, costumes, shadows,
smoke and lighting, for flashing
switches of plot and movement.
Peter McKintosh's 1930's fashions
and his minimal, low-tech sets
are perfect, with Kevin Adams' lighting and Mic Pool's
sound adding to the juiciness of the show.
Everyone seems to be winking at the storyline
and the only drawback is an
unwanted intermission in the hour and a
half play.
The Thirty Nine Steps was Hitchcock's first film, a model
for other films he was later to make.
It concerns the Everyman driven against his will into a threatening,
mysterious
situation.
In a theatre season of psycho dramas and dysfunctional families, this Roundabout
production is a restorative pause, a stylish, imaginative send-up done to
perfection. It is
great fun as Depression-era
Hitchcock presented on Millennium-era Broadway.
Elizabeth Ahlfors
Jamuary 18, 2008
Roundabout's American Airlines
Theatre
227 W. 42nd St. NYC. 1-212-719-1300
Tue— Sat at 8pm; Wed, Sat, Sun at 2pm.
January 4 to March 16,
2008
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January
2008
Come Back Little
Sheba
Before
entering the Biltmore Theatre, try to erase all images of Shirley Booth from the
film and original versions of William Inge's Come Back Little
Sheba, now having its first Broadway
revival. You can do it. You can also ignore the color-blind
casting; interracial marriage was
not the norm in mid-century America.
It is possible to let S. Epatha
Merkerson interpretation of Lola, touch you. Your heart will go out to the lonely,
needy woman who is rejected by her own father and convinces herself to accept a
positive outlook with her alcoholic husband whom she calls "Daddy," while he calls her "Baby."
Although Doc is compelling in his portrayal by a young-looking
Kevin Anderson, Lola is the heart of the play. It is the story of a marriage eroded by
frustration in a time when
societal demands were strict, and keeping to those rules
was often damaging to the spirit.
Come Back Little Sheba is a
deceptively simple story with symbols around every corner. "Sheba" was a little dog whom we never see. She has been lost for years just like
Lola's youthful dreams. Lola's
early pregnancy, forced marriage, and miscarriage led to Doc's
giving up his dreams of medical school and becoming a
chiropractor. Lola was trained for
marriage and motherhood, and as she saw her youth fading, she felt she had
nothing to do
with her life.
Her looks and her home are in disarray, she has no social life, and her
husband's love for her ebbed as he turned to alcohol. The only hope for them came when he
joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and they tried to keep the
marriage intact, although any emotion and intimacy was long gone.
Merkerson, the straight-talking capo-detective in Law and Order, portrays Lola with unique
warmth and yearning. She subtly
relays the loneliness of a woman who yearns for
things to be as they once were. Her only social connections seem to be
with the daily links in her life, the postman, the milkman, and her
neighbor, a meticulous housekeeper and
mother of seven who cannot understand how Lola can neglect her home so badly.
Living in their home is a flirty
young boarder, Marie (Zoe Kazan), a college student who has a fiancé back home
but is currently involved with another student, Turk. Brian J.
Smith's
Turk is not physically hunky but adolescently lusty. Lola lives vicariously through Marie's
vivaciousness, her pretty looks, and her boyfriends. Since her own sexuality is
long gone and her husband has pulled away, Lola is drawn into the sensual relationship between Marie and Turk.
Kazan is a bubbly but savvy Marie, self-absorbed like many adolescents but grateful for Lola's kindness. Nevertheless, when Marie leaves town with her hometown beau (Chad Hoeppner), while she promises to visit, there is no indication that she will visit, write, or even remember her helpful landlady.
Unlike Lola, Doc is
disturbed about Marie's relationship with Turk. Not only does Doc reflect the era's
puritan values, but he is jealous of the sexual energy, and he complains
that
Turk is taking advantage of Marie's purity. Doc feels an increasing pull toward the
liquor bottle in the kitchen. He is
unsteadily balanced on the parallel bar of alcoholism
which collapses when he learns proof of Marie's promiscuity. This leads to a crushing climax with damaging words and unleashed repression.
Inge brings about a resolution that is honest and believable, and when Lola calls for Sheba for the last time, Lola knows it is the last time. Sheba is not coming home.
James Noone's compact set design shows the kitchen and living room of a modest Midwest house, and Jennifer von Mayrhauser created clothes appropriate to the period.
Michael
Pressman directs his cast with patience and natural unfolding. The secondary characters are distinct,
believable and well rounded. The
postman (Lyle Kanouse) brings a
laugh
when he drinks several glasses of water one after another. The milkman (Matthew J. Williamson) is a wannabe muscleman and
grateful for Lola's interest. Brenda Wehle
plays the disapproving neighbor with a caring
efficiency.
While not in the category of
Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams in delving the depths of the spirit and
character of the mid-20th century, William Inge's Come Back Little
Sheba, like Picnic and Bus Stop, is a gritty revisit to a universal relationship of broken dreams in atmosphere that is totally mid-century American.
Elizabeth Ahlfors
January 27, 2008
Biltmore
Theatre
Manhattan Theatre
Club
236 West 47th Street between Broadway
and 8th Avenue
Limited Run to March 16, 2008
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© 2008
Elizabeth Ahlfors. All rights
reserved worldwide