The show was officially called “John Buchan’s The 39 Steps” when I saw it in London. By evening’s end, you’ll have nearly forgotten that the show’s set and costumes (the province of the inspirationally frugal Peter McKintosh, with lighting to match by Kevin Adams) are nearly as spartan as those of a bargain-basement production of “Our Town.” Or how a few battered trunks morph into the interior of and then the roof of a speeding train, or a cluster of humdrum chairs into a getaway car. Ferrin walk a trembling tightrope between archness and ardor. Saunders, who shift identities faster than a field of presidential candidates, manage to embody four to six characters within the same seconds-long fraction of a scene, tossing headgear and coats to each other like circus jugglers. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesĬonsider, for example, how Mr. And that’s no backhanded compliment.įrom left, Charles Edwards, Jennifer Ferrin, Arnieīurton and Cliff Saunders in "The 39 Steps." Credit. Adapted by Patrick Barlow from both the classic spy movie and the John Buchan novel of 1915, this fast, frothy exercise in legerdemain is throwaway theater at its finest.
On the evidence of “The 39 Steps,” directed by Maria Aitken and performed by a cast of four that seems like a cast of thousands, this is very sound advice. Something utterly pointless.” His jaw unclenches for a “Eureka!” moment. Still, there’s something about Richard’s restless ennui in the first scene of this production, which opened on Tuesday night at the American Airlines Theater, that rings loud and true with New Yorkers sinking into the gray oatmeal of January in the city.īored with the tedium of his life, Richard is also fed up with newspapers bearing tales of “elections and wars and rumors of wars.” He longs for “something mindless and trivial. True, the odds are that you’re not as deeply, fatuously handsome as Richard (Charles Edwards), or as square of jaw, clipped of diction or cocked of eyebrow. It’s all too easy to identify with Richard Hannay as he first appears in “The 39 Steps,” the absurdly enjoyable, gleefully theatrical riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film.
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