Around the World in 80 Days and Life on the Mississippi: on-the-road shows that miss some of the attractions
The new Kansas City Repertory Theatre always achieves what it sets out to do. I admire even the shows that I don’t relish, such as the colossal, mechanical A Christmas Story. The current Around the World in 80 Days is also admirable and diverting, and sometimes possessed of the only-in-a-theater imaginative beauty that the Rep has consistently delivered since Eric Rosen took over as artistic director.
An elephant ride over an Indian mountain and a dash across the snowy Midwest in an absurd sailing sledge are finely realized by writer-director Laura Eason. At its best, this adaptation is the work of dedicated pros giving their all in the service of that most noble of goals: pleasing an audience.
Often, though, those pros are restrained, and the wonders of the world withheld. Perhaps this is a case of thematic concerns trumping the instinct toward pleasure, a case of the Rep setting out do something more complicated than it needs to with Jules Verne’s globe-spanning lark.
Phileas Fogg, the stiff-upper-lipped Brit who bets his fortune that he can circumnavigate the globe in you-know-how-long, is an intentionally spiritless creation. Lance Baker is amusingly crusty in the part. Fogg grinds through his life with clockwork precision, in grooves like a music-box character, and he prefers that his wild jaunt be no more exciting. At each stop, he opts to play whist instead of seeing the sights. The trouble is, this denies us the sights as well. Despite all the Rep’s crack designers, what we see here is something like what the Beatles reported seeing on their first trip to America: a train, a steamer, a train, a room.
The setting is spare, the cast is small and the stakes feel low. Quick scenes in bazaars and opium dens feel half-sketched and underpopulated. The set itself, by Jacqueline and Richard Penrod, is cleverly designed, a two-tiered structure whose upper half charts Fogg’s progress on a grand world map. Most of the show’s real feeling comes from Kevin O’Donnell’s whimsical, minimal score.
As he journeys, Fogg learns to value the things that stories usually teach a man like him to appreciate: love, friendship, possibilities. As his world opens up, the show does, too. His valet, played with acrobatic grace by Kevin Douglas, engages in well-choreographed tussles with policemen and cowboys, and Fogg finds himself in a charming, almost subliminal courtship of Mrs. Aouda (Ravi Batista), an Indian woman who joins the trip.
Then there’s that sledge ride in a snowstorm, bathed in gorgeous blue light. The scene is so lovely that even Fogg notices. I only wish that we might have been treated to some of the earlier marvels that he missed.
The Coterie Theatre also has a go at an adaptation of classic literature that’s deeply concerned with modes of transportation. Like Verne’s novel, Mark Twain’s autobiographical Life on the Mississippi details the glories of 19th-century conveyance, but it also has richer concerns. Chief among them: how this new freedom of movement inspired young Samuel Clemens and the whole nation to will themselves to greatness.
Directed by Jeff Church, the Coterie’s musical is a world premiere. Douglas M. Parker’s script revels in Twain’s rascals and tall tales. “Two Arkansas mosquitoes can whip a dog,” one liar boasts, “and four can hold a man down.” I wish the same knockabout spirit had made it into Parker’s lyrics, which too often dip into the self-help nonsense common to Disney. The real Twain, certainly, would damn the line There’s no chart/like your own heart as a crime against the language.
But Denver Casado’s melodies fit the river life. Capably handled by musical director Daniel Doss’ three-piece piano-and-strings combo, the songs unspool with an easy naturalness, like a journey where one horizon follows another.
The performances compel, especially Price Messick as a Clemens who’s a touch moony but also wicked enough to pen elaborate fantasies about murdering the steamboat pilot to whom he’s apprenticed. KC Comeaux and Steven Eubank are funny and credible as young men working the river, and I prized Logan Ernstthal and Matthew Rapport as the gruff and grizzled pilots. And the set, by Megan Catherine Gross, is an inventive playground of Twain’s world, one I bet most kids (and grown-ups) want to crawl around on.
Parker has tamed Twain’s ungainly book, making the show mostly about Clemens becoming Twain. His script breezes through the book’s most stirring moment, which comes when Clemens hears the calls of the crewmen sounding the river’s depths. “Mark three!” they shout, meaning the channel reaches three fathoms down. “Mark twain!” they call, to indicate two, the safest waters. From this, the greatest American writer took his name.
But here, a pilot merely rattles through the terms: Clemens comments that “mark twain” sounds like a name, and the pilot laughs this off in the same way the Ginger Rogers character in a recent American Heartland show declared that television would never work.
What a missed opportunity. The show ends with Clemens behind the steamboat wheel, at last dedicated to writing about the life around him yet still without his pen name. He gazes toward the next horizon, singing “Where I’m Going.”
When the lights dropped, I sat perplexed. How could this American origin story conclude with anything but a riverman shouting — christening — “Mark Twain”?
