If you have never seen the 1935 Alfred Hitchcock movie The 39 Steps, or haven’t seen it in a long time, read the synopsis from the Internet Movie Database.
Everything that is described there also happens in the Tony-award-winning comedy, The 39 Steps, currently playing at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady.
The difference is that the theatrical production is a farce, played for laughs, with some 150 characters being played by only four actors. The lead actor has but one role, and the sole actress only three. This means rapid changes in character for the other two actors, identified in the playbill only as Man #1 and Man #2, in a fast-paced romp, described on the Broadway website as having a “dash of Monty Python.” I wonder if that was in reference to the cross-dressing.
Hitch
How much you enjoy the production currently playing at Proctor’s – I attended Tuesday night – will depend in no small part on how well one is verse in Hitchcock lore. Hitch himself makes a cameo, of course. As a shadow puppet, no less. Specific references to North by Northwest, Psycho, Rear Window, Strangers on a Train, and Vertigo, among others, will be only passingly funny, if that, without understanding the context.
Other parts of the farce, however, are quite humorous even with no understanding of the films in questions. Much of it is physical humor; not pratfalls as much as the stretching of physical boundaries. One particular scene involved going through a number of doors, represented by only one.
I felt the action sagged a little in the second act, possibly hemmed in by the need to hew to the established storyline.
I don’t know where TU reviewer Michael Eck was sitting; I was within a dozen rows of the front. His review suggests that the play is too small for the room, and if I were sitting farther back, I definitely could imagine that, even though the frame on the stage was designed, I’m guessing, to make the stage feel smaller and more intimate.
All in all, an enjoyable evening.
