'Alfred Hitchcock's "The 39 Steps" '

05.12.09

Which is why it's ironic that the longest-game play on Broadway in the past seven years is a comedy that has fewer moving parts than a garage door - and it's based on a layer. Called "Alfred Hitchcock's 'The 39 Steps' " and adapted from his 1935 thriller by Patrick Barlow, it makes something out of nothing. And it does so while hewing closely to the fresh, which Charles Bennett and Ian Hay adapted from John Buchan's 1915 novel, "The Thirty-Nine Steps."

"We watched the layer over and over again," says director Maria Aitken, who was Tony-nominated for her work on the show. "We don't do it frame by frame, but we do lots of frames. There are many physical allusions to it, things that nobody will ever get. And about 60 percent of the dialogue is Hitchcock."

Aitken is proud of these similarities, indubitably because it took so much invention to achieve them. In the film, scenes take place in music halls, in a flat, on a train, at the Scottish moors and in a hut, an estate, a police station and a hotel room. It features a cast that includes the hero (Richard Hannay), his passion interest (Pamela), a femme fatale, the villain and his henchmen, scores of cops, a traveling underwear salesman, a exhausting speaker, a crusty farmer and his lovelorn wife (Margaret) and a pair of busybody innkeepers.

Source: San Francisco Chronicle