THE THEATER ENTERS A NOIR PHASE
                        Between Bleak and Black  
                                              By Carol Benet
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area theater
                                                                 Weeks starting Dec. 11, 2009
                                                                 Vol. 12, No. 46
           We’ve entered a revival mode, perhaps for want of new ideas.
             That’s the trend.  Either standard or once great hits (South Pacific; Gypsy) are being revived and played over and over again, or else movies (The Wiz) are made into stage plays.  Any room for originality in this system?
              The 39 Steps that just opened at the Curran Theater comes shortly after A.C.T.’s great and recent hit Brief Encounter that just opened on Broadway to much fanfare.  Both fit into the second category – old movies transported to the live stage.
              The 39 Steps comes from an Alfred Hitchcock movie by the same name with all the noir elements.  The current adaptors (Patrick Barlow and Maria Aitken, director) watched the film many, many times, frame by frame to get it right.
              I saw the play in London last month and was surprised how much it changed for American audiences.  In London, fitting for the date of the movie (1935), the proto-Nazi characters were highlighted.  Here, not---only a Hitler moustache and a moment of goose-step.
              Did they think the American audiences wouldn’t get it the same way the English did?
                But the play, the longest running one on Broadway in the last seven years before its road show currently in San Francisco, is worth seeing.  Although not as consistently entertaining and creative as Brief Encounter, it also plays on the original movie from which it comes. There are scenes with shadow puppets behind a screen that replicate famous scenes in North by Northwest when the airplane is buzzing close to a figure of a man trying to escape it.  The constant fog on stage obliterating much of what you see, the femme fatale smoking like a chimney, the blond heroine (both played by Claire Brownell) and the stiff upper lip English man  (Ted Deasy) who is caught in the middle of lots of dilemmas are boosted by the other two characters (Scott Parkinson and Eric Hissom) in the cast who play multiple roles as the bad guys, the good guys, you name it. The production borrows from Laurel and Hardy, from vaudeville, slapstick and mime.
            Fun to see. Take the kids too.

        © Carol Benet 2009
        Carol Benet is a regular theater reviewer for artssf.com.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly)focus on theater, dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into recordings by local artists, and a few departures into books (by authors of the region)as well.
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