Review of Reviews: Stage

Alfred Hitchcock’s

The 39 Steps

American Airlines Theater, New York

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★★★

As the curtain rises on The 39 Steps, Englishman Richard Hannay is seeking “something mindless and trivial” to relieve his boredom, said Linda Winer in Newsday. “I know,” he cries. “I’ll go to the theater!” In short order Hannay meets a mysterious woman, becomes the prime suspect in her murder, and flees to Scotland. As in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film, Hannay also stumbles across a shadowy foreign conspiracy, gets accused of seducing a farmer’s wife, and ends up handcuffed to a pretty passer-by who helps clear his name. “Did we mention he also escapes being crushed by the collision of two biplanes and just misses an encounter with the ominously tubby outline of Hitchcock himself?” Just four actors play dozens of characters, employing simple props in ingenious ways. Director Maria Aitken’s tongue-in-cheek re-creation may be mindless entertainment, but it’s “physically and conceptually ingenious,” full of physical comedy and affectionate tributes to the Hitchcock oeuvre.

I’d hardly call this grab bag of gags a tribute, said Howard Shapiro in The Philadelphia Inquirer. More like a desecration. The entire play is built on winking, inside jokes about a 73-year-old movie and “assumes we know and love the original.” Those unfamiliar with the film will probably have a more enjoyable evening if they take a trip to the video store and check out the superior original. You’re bound to ask yourself: Why would anyone “take such a smart movie and turn it into a shtick-a-minute lampoon”?

Simply because it’s an awful lot of fun, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. “The 39 Steps isn’t using its source material as a satiric target but as an accomplice,” as it basks in the simple joys of telling such a story with a small cast and sets “nearly as spartan as those of a bargain-basement production of Our Town.” Charles Edwards, as hero Hannay, is the quintessential “gentlemanly but virile” leading man. Jennifer Ferrin plays the mysterious dead woman, the farmer’s wife, and the pretty passer-by. Cliff Saunders and Arnie Burton play just about everyone else, from a train conductor to the criminal mastermind. Together these quick-change artists use “their cinematic template to celebrate the art of instant illusion-making that is theater.” After a season of such overblown film-to-stage adaptations as Young Frankenstein and The Little Mermaid, this 39 Steps is delightfully unpretentious and down-to-earth.