Throw into the mix a bumbling detective bent on arresting Fogg for a suspected robbery, an Indian princess rescued from certain death and several natural disasters, you should have the recipe for a good time.įrom a purely technical perspective, TheatreWorks puts on a fantastic show. Thus begins an adventure that takes Fogg, Passepartout and the friends, enemies and unexpected allies they make along the way around the world. Fogg wagers that he can make it in 80 days and the men take him up on it, to the tune of £20,000. On the day Passepartout arrives, the men at the gentlemen's club read an article announcing the completion of a transcontinental railroad in British-held India - making it technically feasible for a person to complete a round-the-world trip by train and steamship for the first time. ![]() When a new servant, a Frenchman named Passepartout, arrives, he sees this as the perfect assignment: After a wild and unpredictable life, he's ready to settle down and have some stability. He's driven out several servants with his finicky and exacting behavior, and the gentleman at his club think he's a bit of an odd duck. "Around the World in 80 Days" follows the story of a British gentleman named Phileas Fogg, whose life has been completely predictable, punctual and devoid of friendship or family. Yet TheatreWorks Silicon Valley has pulled it out of the time capsule, bringing the 2001 adaptation by playwright Mark Brown to Palo Alto this holiday season. It's very probable that Jules Verne, French author and one of the fathers of science fiction, never anticipated that his "Around the World in 80 Days" would be playing as a madcap farce on stages in 2017. We end up rooting not just for Fogg to reach the end of his journey, but also for this company to do the same.Sir Francis (Ron Campbell) and Parsi (Michael Gene Sullivan) cower from "formidable beasts" in TheatreWorks Silicon Valley's "Around the World in 80 Days." Photo by Kevin Berne. Though it's perhaps not as "meta-theater" as Irma Vep, what Brown has done is probably the best stage presentation this story could have. If you've seen The 39 Steps or The Mystery of Irma Vep, you have a pretty good idea of what you're in for. So the show becomes a theatrical event where the manner in which the story is told is - possibly - more interesting than the story itself.įive actors, two stairwells, five doors and four chairs are shuffled repeatedly to move us through Verne's tale. In the Pittsburgh Public Theater production, our hero, Phileas Fogg, and his servant, Passepartout, are played by two actors, and everyone else they meet in their bet to circumnavigate the globe in two-and-a-half months are played by only three other actors. In lieu of the far-flung, outsized fittings, he's substituted that old standby - Show Biz! But playwright Mark Brown has done a very clever thing. ![]() This 1873 Jules Verne novel is regarded less as a hallmark of literature than as a cracking adventure story set in exotic locales - and unless you're Cameron Macintosh, exotic locales aren't readily recreated on stage. ![]() At first glance, a stage adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days might seem counterintuitive.
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