Denver Center production a fun-house ride through a noir landscape
Silly is in at the Denver Center in this DCPA Theatre Company production of The 39 Steps. Based on a 1935 Alfred Hitchcock film of the same name (itself based on a novel by John Buchan), this story was adapted for the stage by Patrick Barlow into a noir-ish sprint through a series of action-movie and pulp-fiction tropes. The gag is that the whole thing is pulled off by four actors with a trunkful of props and costumes to make it all work.
While the source material is played straight, Barlow’s adaption is an endlessly clever series of scenes that, while entirely faithful plot-wise, become very funny when played large for laughs.
Marco Alberto Robinson plays Richard Hannay, a Londoner who’s followed home one night by a sexy spy named Annabella (Amelia Pedlow) with an outrageous accent of indeterminate origins. There’s something about a plot, national intelligence something-or-other and Hannay soon ends up on the run after Annabella ends up with a knife in her back. (If that sounds a little North by Northwest-ian, there are plenty of other Hitchcock Easter eggs throughout the show.)
Now the fun starts. With the help of two swing characters — or “clowns” — (Henry Walter Greenberg and Nate Miller) and Pedlow playing several other female parts, Hannay sets off on a high-speed adventure to find out what the mysterious “39 Steps” organization is while trying to stay one step ahead of the cops and other authorities trying to catch him.
Robinson is a gas as the mustachioed, pipe-smoking Brit playing every scene for all it’s worth and mugging his way through a veritable obstacle course of madcap characters and scene changes. The fun is in seeing who he’ll encounter next: a pair of dipshit bobbies on a train, a sex-starved Scottish farmwife living with a much older (and angrier) man, a doofus milkman or a stage charlatan called “Mr. Memory.”
There are so many priceless moments in The 39 Steps where age-old stagecraft tricks remind us of the world before CGI and other movie magic. One of my favorite is the “restless sleep timelapse” Robinson acts out, and another is simply running in place with a spotlight on him to show the chase. As the clowns, Miller and Greenberg are simply tremendous, morphing endlessly into other characters on the fly be they male, female or even inanimate objects. Pedlow is similarly delightful with her three characters. Annabella doesn’t last long but the depiction of the farmer’s wife Margaret is dead-on and the skeptical hottie Pamela is a hoot.
The 39 Steps has been around since 2005 in this form but this is the first time I’d had a chance to see it and it certainly lives up to its reputation for a super-fun night at the theatre. This Denver Center production sharply directed by Meredith McDonough is being staged in the smaller Singleton Theatre, where there’s not a bad seat in the house. Check it out if you can!
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