Newsday’s theatre reviewer Linda Winer had a good column the other day called “Comedies without content clutter Broadway.”
Winer wrote that she has been “cranky” lately about a run of plays offering little more than “hard-sell, punch-line humor with nothing on (their) fluff-ball mind(s) beyond trying to be funny.”
In this category, Winer lumped the recently closed Mark Twain rediscovery “Is He Dead,?” David Mamet’s new political comedy, “November” and one of the major hits of the current season, “The 39 Steps.”
The stage adaptation of the Alfred Hitchcock movie has been a smash in London for the past two seasons and was imported to Broadway in January.
The production of Patrick Barlow’s script has been equally successful on this side of the Atlantic. Two weeks ago, it was announced that “The 39 Steps” would move from its limited non-profit Roundabout Theatre Company run at the American Airlines Theatre (ending this Saturday) to the Cort Theatre for open-ended commercial Broadway engagement, starting April 29.
Friends who saw the comedy in London brought back wildly enthusiastic reports, and the New York reviews were almost unanimously positive, but after last Sunday’s matinee I was left thinking, “Is that all there is?”
The 90-minute condensed version of the movie is clever — dozens of roles are played by the cast of four and the show races from scene to scene with very imaginative set and lighting design.
But, this sort of homage/parody has been done with much greater skill and with more of a satirical point by American actor/playwright Charles Busch in wild Hollywood anti-nostalgia pieces like “Die Mommie Die!”
And, the stunt of having a small group of actors quickly changing their way into multiple roles was the engine that drove Charles Ludlam’s wacky off-Broadway hit, “The Mystery of Irma Vep.”
The manner in which “The 39 Steps” milks laughs from the mere mention of other Hitchcock titles such as “Vertigo” and “North by Northwest” seemed rather lame to me — second-rate movie buff self-congratulation.
I agree with Winer’s assertion that the actors are “physical virtuosos and the staging, ingenious,” but for me the show is never funny enough or smart enough to justify Broadway prices.
