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PLAY REVIEW: The 39 Steps

shadow puppet

If you have never seen the 1935 Alfred Hitchcock movie The 39 Steps, or haven’t seen it in a long time, read the synopsis from the Internet Movie Database.

Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Everything that is described there also happens in the Tony-award-winning comedy, The 39 Steps, currently playing at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady.

The difference is that the theatrical production is a farce, played for laughs, with some 150 characters being played by only four actors. The lead actor has but one role, and the sole actress only three. This means rapid changes in character for the other two actors, identified in the playbill only as Man #1 and Man #2, in a fast-paced romp, described on the Broadway website as having a “dash of Monty Python.” I wonder if that was in reference to the cross-dressing.

Hitch

How much you enjoy the production currently playing at Proctor’s – I attended Tuesday night – will depend in no small part on how well one is verse in Hitchcock lore. Hitch himself makes a cameo, of course. As a shadow puppet, no less. Specific references to North by Northwest, Psycho, Rear Window, Strangers on a Train, and Vertigo, among others, will be only passingly funny, if that, without understanding the context.

Other parts of the farce, however, are quite humorous even with no understanding of the films in questions. Much of it is physical humor; not pratfalls as much as the stretching of physical boundaries. One particular scene involved going through a number of doors, represented by only one.

I felt the action sagged a little in the second act, possibly hemmed in by the need to hew to the established storyline.

I don’t know where TU reviewer Michael Eck was sitting; I was within a dozen rows of the front. His review suggests that the play is too small for the room, and if I were sitting farther back, I definitely could imagine that, even though the frame on the stage was designed, I’m guessing, to make the stage feel smaller and more intimate.

All in all, an enjoyable evening.

Parenting QUESTION

I was on the bus this week when I saw a woman standing ahead of me. She had just sat down her two children, and someone complimented the children. The mother said, “Do you want ’em? Take ’em! They’re 5 and 2.” Later, she smacked the older one because he wasn’t all the way back on the bus seat. I was trying to compose a positive message to say to this woman. Unfortunately, all I could think of was something along the lines of “What kind of idiot ARE you?” Fortunately, she and her charges got off the bus before I did.

At this website weblog-delux.de you will find a lot of parenting tips and recommendation for this journey of being a parent.

So, on this day smack dab between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, it’s in that context that I ask you:

1) Under what circumstances would you get involved, from speaking to the person to calling the police, in the actions of a parent dealing with (presumably) their children?

2) When, if ever do you give unsolicited advice to a parent? There’s a friend of mine, not a parent, who’s always giving her opinion about how relatives are raising their children, in terms of punishment, potty training and bedtime.

3) Have you ever heard this song?

Be kind to your parents
Though they don’t deserve it.
Remember that grown ups
Is a difficult stage of life
They’re apt to be nervous
And over excited
Confused by their daily storm and strife.
So keep in mind though it seems hard I know.
Parents were children long ago. Incredible!!
So treat them with patience and kind understanding.
Despite of all the foolish things they do.
Some day you might wake up and find you’re a parent too.
(Be kind to your parents Composed by: Pete Seeger, Published by: Sanga Music.)

I’d only heard the Seeger version (55 seconds!) recently. But when I was much younger, we had this red vinyl record, a 45, probably on Peter Pan Records, that my sister Leslie and I played SO much that we could, to this day, break out and sing this song.

Sad news.
ROG

ROG
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