Among the enthusiastic audience at the recent American Conservatory Theater opening of “North by Northwest,” Emma Rice’s stage adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller, it seems that hardly anyone followed the circuitous plot. As the two-and-a-half-hour (with intermission) production proceeded, by the time the first act ended, many seemed lost.
Still, most also were entranced throughout Act 1 by Rice’s flat-out, almost childlike delight in re-imagining the classic movie. With wit and grit, she embellishes, reconfigures and reinvents every detail of Hitchcock’s story. The original script, which Rice carefully consulted, was written by Ernest Lehman.
At the forefront of this version of “North by Northwest” is brilliant acting on the part of the multi-talented, seven-member cast brought over from Rice’s British-based company. Most play multiple characters. At the show’s outset, they lurk onstage in trench coats and fedoras while a recorded voice with a British accent welcomes the audience.
At the center of the plot is an initially baffled, later rageful everyman, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant in the movie, Danny Collins here), an innocent man who’s plucked from a quiet drink at the Plaza Hotel in New York, apparently mistaken for someone else: kidnapped.
Most of the other actors play multiple characters, and Katy Owen is a tiny man, a sort of trickster-narrator, a comical figure who occasionally interacts with the audience and slyly acknowledges their confusion about the plot.
This cast, with physical expertise, wows with jazzy, stylized movement and dance. Nobody just walks—that would be too ordinary—they twist and turn like pretzels, arch their backs, mince, squat and leap. Their bodies are elastic and pliable. Are they even human?
They don’t sing. They lip-sync to recorded music sung by great crooners of that era, the songs chosen to express the characters’ emotions of the moment; the juxtaposition is hilarious and even touching at times.
Theatergoers who don’t worry about the plot will keep engaged by the plentiful eye candy.
The action speeds along. Thornhill finds himself heading for Chicago on a train (and falling for a rather suspicious blonde), racing (in place) across cornfields pursued by malevolent crop dusters and climbing up Mount Rushmore. The shadow of the Cold War lurks everywhere, reminding us—not that we need reminding—of the world disorder that exists right now.
Audience members who give up trying to figure out exactly what’s happening and accept that the show is Rice’s fever dream (not meant to be anything other than a brilliant theater artist’s challenge to self, and that it’s really too long for comfort) … well, they’ll gasp in admiration.
American Conservatory Theater’s “North by Northwest” continues through Oct. 18 at the Toni Rembe Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco; tickets are $25-$130 at act-sf.org.