The 39 Steps
January 18th, 2008
Silvija allowed me to accompany her yesterday, courtesy of Playbill press tickets, to see The 39 Steps on Broadway, gratis.
You can see the best and worst qualities of this play in my picture on the left—the fantastic poster and my post-show haze of boredom and underwhelmity. Like many other Broadway shows I’ve seen, I hesistate to criticize as my first through is always “I am not the audience for this.” But, this is a comedy stage adaption of a Hitchcock film classic. On paper, it’s 100% in my wheelhouse; however, in audience, I flipped between being apologetic for not enjoying it more to being angry about the camp winky-ness and telegraphed jokes to just being peeved.
I knew nothing about the show beforehand. I actually thought it was going to be a straight adaption. Silvija said it’s a monster hit in England. The history in a nutshell is: there was a 2-man cast adaption of the film first (like Irma Vep or Gutenburg!, I suppose) and the producer of this version expanded to a central actor in the lead, a woman who does 3 female roles and 2 clownish-looking swing guys who play everything else. I’m fine with that (though it’s a missed opportunity the female actor never played any other swing roles and no male roles; the two buffoons play a variety of arch “bad drag” roles), but the majority of the show there’s no joke beside “look it’s crazy how many roles these guys are playing… oops! he’s gotta find a reason to leave so he can play that other guy again! Oh, the wackiness.”
Silvija, at intermission, still in apologetic mode, said she wished the script was funnier. It seemed like a second draft of a show, in desperate need of punch-up in the long talky scenes where there was no physical comedy. The pacing overall was weird and you could feel real impatience from the crowd when a physical bit was outstaying its welcome and repeating over and over without really growing or changing. That said, there are a handful of moments of vaudeville-y stuff that do deliver—a guy takes a punch to the face and literally falls over backwards, rolls up onto his head and over and another scene has some “comedy sleeping” that I will embarrasingly point to as something that delighted me on my deepest, dumbest level. There is some great object work and miming, but it’s constantly brought down by mugging, winking, breaking the reality with 4th wall call-outs. They shoehorn in the names of 5 Hitchcock films into the dialogue, which is fine… groanworthy… but every time they do there’s a take to the audience, rewarding them for “getting it” and grinding the proceedings to a halt. The “games” of the show that made me the angriest were the endless mugging and pointing out how hard it is to do a whole movie with four actors, which by the second half had become a recurring gag of “You guys stop wasting time… you’re not a river/pile of rocks/10 policeman, you’re just a man waving a sheet around and get on with it.”
I mean, this show didn’t make me want to kill myself (as other Broadway shows have… I’m looking at you, second act of Spring Awakening) and there was enough interesting stagecraft to pull me through. Should YOU get free tickets (or cheap tickets), it’s worth a look. But steel yourself for mugging.