This week’s ”Stage” page features an interview with Jim Covault, artistic director of Stage West and director of their current comic production Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, which opens tomorrow (Thursday). AH39S is a shot of undiluted theater for fans of the daredevil aspects of live performance, as three actors assum
e more than a hundred roles in retelling the complicated plot from Hitch’s 1935 spy classic. If Stage West pulls it off, this could become one of the most talked-about North Texas shows of the year.
Here’s a brief but very famous clip from the original film version that gives you a good feeling for all the incidental complications – handcuffs, sandwiches, silk stockings (va va voom!) — that the Stage West actors must work with. Here’s a clip from the same handcuffs-sandwiches-stockings scene in the Broadway production of AH39S. Here’s a ten minute entertainment news/promotional piece about the U.S. touring production that came through Dallas earlier this year. (Covault saw that staging and made different creative choices for Stage West’s version).
