The 39 Steps
Opening Night: January 15, 2008
Closing: January 10, 2010
Theater: Cort Theatre
Part espionage thriller and part slapstick comedy, the production features four actors who portray all the characters and all the action from the 1935 Alfred Hitchcock film, including the chase atop the Flying Scotsman train, a bi-plane crash and the death-defying finale in London’s Palladium theatre.
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December 16, 2008
This fast, frothy exercise in legerdemain is throwaway theater at its finest. And that’s no backhanded compliment.
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April 22, 2014
An utterly pointless but physically and conceptually ingenious spoof of Alfred Hitchcock’s equally foolish but stylish and dead-serious spy thriller from 1935." & "In fact, given the assignment and the material, the extended sketch is as clever as it knows how to be.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2014
39 Steps isn’t likely to earn a Tony Award to accompany its Olivier, especially given the unusual assortment of weighty new plays that opened on Broadway last fall. But it’s an impeccably crafted trifle, a lot tastier than many of the richer confections that have turned up in commercial theater lately.
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April 22, 2014
The central joke in this frenetic spoof is the utter unsuitability of the material — with its high-speed chases across moors, rivers, an elevated bridge and the roof of a moving train — for stage presentation.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2014
Suspense-meister Alfred Hitchcock probably never imagined his thriller The 39 Steps had the makings of a hilarious comedy, but the show …is a dizzy delight.
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April 22, 2014
The play’s creators have affectionately pushed Hitchcock’s brilliance – watch for various homages to such movies as The Birds and The Lady Vanishes – into some riotous realm of satire, without losing its essentially Hitchcockian flavor.
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April 22, 2014
The business of spoofing films on stage is a particularly tricky one, as anyone who saw Debbie Does Dallas can attest, so kudos are decidedly due to adaptor Patrick Barlow and director Maria Aitken for transforming Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 thriller The 39 Steps, now on stage at the Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre, into a highly amusing theatrical event that will both satisfy those audience members who have never seen the film and delight those who are familiar with its cinematic predecessor.
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