Following in footsteps of Hitchcock film
North by Northwest (out of 4) Based on the film by Alfred Hitchcock. Adapted by Carolyn Burns. Directed by Simon Phillips. Until October 29 at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, 260 King Street West. Mirvish.ca or 416.872.1212.
The summer of 2017 came and went without the expected blockbuster hits at the movie theatres.
But on a particularly sweltering Sunday afternoon in downtown Toronto, Mirvish Productions presented a celebration of cinematic success at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, suggesting the summer season of extravagant escapism hasn’t quite finished with us just yet.
Making its North American premiere with Mirvish after originating at the Theatre Royal Bath, Simon Phillips’s stage production of the 1959 Hitchcock film North By Northwest (written by Ernest Lehman), adapted by TV writer and playwright Carolyn Burns, carouses in the artistic frivolity of its source material.
North By Northwest, arguably the famous filmmaker’s most purely entertaining work, a theatrical adaptation is an unexpectedly apt platform to recreate the film’s sense of play and adventure. This isn’t a piece of cinema that takes itself too seriously — it does, after all, end by symbolizing its two lovers consummating their relationship with a shot of a train entering a tunnel.
In terms of Burns’s dialogue, Esther Marie Hayes’s costumes, and Ian MacDonald’s sound design, using Bernard Herrmann’s original compositions, Phillips’s re-envisioning stays remarkably close to the original. Jonathan Watton plays a Cary Grant-light version of Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive everyman who is drawn into a plot of government agency espionage when he is mistaken for another man named George Kaplan, taking him from New York City to cornfields outside of Chicago to Mount Rushmore with a blond bombshell named Eve (Olivia Fines), pursued by villain Vandamm (Gerald Kyd). Not that the details of the plot are crucial to anyone’s enjoyment of either adaptation, but where the film is known for its atmosphere, charismatic performances and moments of suspense, Phillips smartly creates intrigue using theatrical stage craft to replicate the film’s iconic moments.
On a set of moving furniture pieces against a slick black grid that doubles as a backdrop for film projections, live onstage cameras and miniature props turn the set’s upstage wall into the New York City streetscape, a camera lens zooming in on an important prop, or a spinning newspaper front page. Though live film on stage has already been virtually perfected in productions like Robert Lepage’s unforgettable 887, presented by Canadian Stage last season, it finds a fitting use here. It can be clever, when it highlights a piece of writing, suspenseful, when simulating the famous crop-duster scene, or entirely silly, when using the faces of the cast to stand in for the presidential carvings of Mount Rushmore. The latter example might not be the slickest moment in the production, but it certainly plays into Hitchcock’s love for entertaining and memorable visuals.
In its devotion to its source material, this production of North by Northwest can offer fans of the film the excitement of witnessing it play out before their eyes — a love letter to the age of filmmaking that relied on practical effects. Beyond that, the show doesn’t seek to argue a purpose for revisiting this story at this moment. But of course, that’s fine too. There’s no reason for mistaking North by Northwest for anything other than what it is.