Around the World in 80 Days by Mark Brown Review
Put your imagaination to work in this product of Around the Earth in Eighty Days.
Photo by Joey Watkins Photography
Mark Brownish's zippy adaptation of Jules Verne'south adventure novel Around the Globe in Lxxx Days , now delighting all at A.D. Players, is a yard example of meta-theater. Nosotros, the audition, are taken out of quotidian reality and plopped firmly in the lap of skilful old-fashioned playacting. Nosotros're kids again, running effectually the neighborhood pretending we're sailing the Caribbean on a pirate ship, or dodging arrows from marauding Indians in our backyard.
Inside the safety of the theater, the experience is all deliciously phony. Never for a moment do we call up we're not watching a well-oiled prove. This is exquisite theater magic at its near magical. When what looks similar two costume shop clothes racks are pushed together, 2 pillows nestled at the summit rail, and a dryer's aluminum air vent hung from that rail, what do you run into? Why an elephant at once. Peachy steamships are footling toys, lifted in the swells by the actors; the railway car is conjured by ii wooden boxes; the deck and masts of a boat are made out of footstep ladders; a train's wheels are but 2 spinning open umbrellas. It'south all so clever and fun-filled. This production laughs with us, poking united states of america that theater doesn't have to exist all doom and gloom. Information technology can be silly and goofy, anything your mind imagines.
Even amend, of course, is that but v actors play the 39 characters whizzing around the world. These non-terminate thespians go plenty of aid from three stage administration who keep the props materializing, and sound furnishings/musician Jerry Poland, patently visible in the side box where his toots, whistles, and guitar riffs add delightful punctuation to the whirligig going on below.
You lot know the story, don't you? Aristocratic Phileas Fogg (Kevin Michael Dean), obsessive and driven by mathematical precision, bets the members of his baronial men's club that with today's technology and innovation, it'southward entirely probable, nay, a certainty, that he can circumnavigate the globe in precisely eighty days. Railways take recently connected the Asian subcontinent, while fast clipper ships, driven past steam, ply the seas. A man'south journeying can be calculated to the minute. Why this is 1872, my good human, the height of Victorian tin can-do spirit.
What Fogg doesn't know is that at this precise moment, someone has robbed the Bank of England, and the clarification matches Fogg. Detective Ready is also a man of absolute certainty, and he believes Fogg, who is now escaping under dubious circumstances with a new French valet Passepartout (Braden Hunt), is his man. Intrepid like a cutting-rate Holmes, he will follow and capture.
Fogg's adventures carry him from London to Suez, Bombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco, New York Urban center, and triumphantly back to London. Brown is true-blue to Verne, and omits the balloon trip over the Alps that was such a memorable scene in the 1956 Oscar-winning movie, starring David Niven, Cantinflas, and Shirley MacLaine. The scene was cinematic, but was not in Verne, so out information technology went for Chocolate-brown.
Princess Aouda (Skyler Sinclair) is the spark who will later thaw icy Fogg (Kevin Michael Dean)..
Photo past Joey Watkins Photography
Along the mode, the travelers add another to their retinue, Princess Aouda (Skyler Sinclair) who Passepartout saves from burning alive in a suttee ceremony. She'due south the spark who will later on thaw icy Fogg. Craig Griffin and Luis Quintero ably round out the cast, playing a global array of mahouts, judges, conductors, an old biddy in drag, an opium den proprietor, ship captains, and wild west jingoists.
Throughout, their adventures are burnished with lovely silly touches. On the transcontinental railroad from San Francisco, Passepartout saves the day once more past uncoupling the railroad train from underneath. He uses a GI Joe doll, similar a comic book superhero, to perform his derring-practice. Aouda does a swell backward somersault when the railroad train of a sudden halts. Fogg'due south temporary jail is a box on which he holds two sticks. A newsboy (Sinclair again) runs through the play with breaking news of Fogg's progress. The world globe is an enormous balloon.
Michael Mullins' design is all backstage detritus turned into wonder, similar that adulation-getting elephant. Jack Jacobs' lighting is accordingly splashy; and Danielle Hodgins' costumes, with quick-change velcro, I suppose, are colorful and pic book perfect.
This is all wonderful fun, a child's view of theater, and ane nosotros must never grow out of. Managing director Philip Lehl deftly handles the light touch of it all, giving the show an improvisational, antic tone that is just correct.
For children of all ages, this trip around the globe with these dauntless loons is 1 trip y'all won't forget. Pack your numberless and start grin.
Effectually the World in Eighty Days continues through September xxx at 7:30 pm Wednesdays and Thursdays; 8 pm Fridays and Saturdays; and two:30 pm Saturday and Sunday matinees at A.D. Players at the Jeannette & Fifty.M. George Theater, 5420 Westheimer. For information, telephone call 713-526-2721 or visit adplayers.org. $35-$70.
Source: https://www.houstonpress.com/arts/things-to-do-a-review-of-around-the-world-in-eighty-days-10865661
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