Hitchcock gets theatrical in fizzy ‘North by Northwest’
Danny Collins leaps into action as Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest, the season-opening production from American Conservatory Theater. Photo by Rich Soublet II
Emma Rice, a director/adapater/wizard is one of those theatrical name brands: if you see she’s attached to something, you should go. No questions asked. Her numerous shows at Berkeley Repertory Theatre (The Wild Bride and Tristan & Yseult chief among them) were so vibrant and refreshing that when she crossed the Bay to American Conservatory Theater with Brief Encounter it only seemed fair that she should share the wealth.
The extraordinary Rice is back at ACT to open the company’s 60th anniversary season, this time with a stage adaptation of what would seem to be an unstageable movie: Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Already a hit in the UK, this remarkably deft show is now dazzling American audiences with its highly theatrical, not remotely cinematic style.
Collins’ Thornhill is confused by Evangeline Dickson’s Mrs. Townsend in North by Northwest. Photo by Rich Soublet II.
In Brief Encounter, which took its cue from playwright Noël Coward and filmmaker David Lean, Rice conjured up sumptuous stage pictures that utilized giant projections wondrously. In adapting Hitchcock, you would think she would lean on projections again, but there’s not a single screen on stage at the Toni Rembe Theater. And the play is all the better for it.
Rice is all about using people and imagination to conjure a world. In North by Northwest, set and costume designer Rob Howell helps her bring us into the Cold War era, 1959 specifically. Howell fills the stage with towers of revolving doors that literally spin the action from swingin’ Manhattan to the United Nations to Chicago to an Indiana cornfield and, of course, Mount Rushmore.
Behind the towers (which are decorated mainly with cocktail accoutrements – it may be a Cold War, but everyone’s drinking martinis!) are a rack of clothes – primarily jackets – that runs the width of the stage and a row of suitcases that the actors use to delineate locations and important props. When a suitcase is set before us and its label reads, “Townsend Estate,” we know where we are. Or when a briefcase becomes important in an auction, the label lets us know it once belonged to Abraham Lincoln.
Clarity in this convoluted tale of espionage and mistaken identity is key. Rice has freely adapted the film script by Ernest Lehman and turned one of its characters, The Professor, into the narrator, who slips in and out of the action. Played with clown-like gusto by Katy Owen, The Professor is our whimsical guide through what turns out to be a much zanier experience than the film.
The cast of North by Northwest includes (from left) Simon Oskarsson, Katy Owen (as the Professor/Narrator) and Ewan Wardrop. Photo by Steve Tanner
Rice, as usual, demands a great deal from her seven-person cast: they have to be serious actors; they have to be dazzling, dancing clowns; they have to keep the tension up amid the laughs; and they have to sell their lip-synched musical numbers to songs by the likes of Peggy Lee, Betty Hutton, Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone, all the while conveying the ultra-cool vibe of a mid-century modern spy thriller.
They’re all marvelous, with the indefatigable Danny Collins as New York ad man Roger Thornhill, who gets caught up in a web of intrigue that takes him across the country. Collins is part Jim Carrey, part Fred Astaire and all dashing leading man. Patrycja Kujawska, like most of the cast, plays a number of roles, but she makes her biggest impression as Eve Kendall, the enigmatic stranger on the train who helps Roger hide from the bad guys (headed by Karl Queensborough, who also has fun playing Roger’s fussy mother).
You wonder how in the world Rice will tackle the famous crop duster and climactic Mount Rushmore scenes, but she and her actors do it all with aplomb.
The plot begins to wear pretty thin in Act 2 (despite those famous scenes), and the tacked-on ending, which casts the United Nations as heroic global peacemaker, can’t help but feel ironic from our near-apocalyptic vantage point. But there’s just no denying the giddy joy and surprising theatricality this North by Northwest has to offer.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest continues through Oct. 18 at American Conservatory Theater’s Toni Rembe Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Running time: 2 hours and 30 minutes (including intermission). Tickets are $25-$130 (subject to change). Call 415-749-2228 or visit act-sf.org/northwest.
