Phileas Fogg goes around the world in 80 days. Wow.
People who should see this show:
The employees of the theatre. Cause they have to.
There was just nothing good about it. At all. The story seems like it could produce something worth seeing, but it never did. It was a series of uninteresting anecdotes, bad slapstick, and uninspired dialogue made difficult to understand by bad accents. Parnelli Parnes, playing Passepartout, certainly acted his heart out, but it was to no avail. I have been in his shoes, acting my heart out in what I knew in the depths of my soul was a horrible, horrible show, and I cannot blame him at all for what I saw. Nor can I blame Ted Cole, playing Fogg, who, it seemed, was directed by Simon Johnston to never show any emotion. Possibly this made him an amusing character to read about in the book. Certainly it made the production incredibly boring. I do, however, blame Keith Martin Gordey for his horrible slapstick, horrible accents and horrible characterization as Detective Fix and other characters.
We wanted to leave about 3 seconds into it, but there were people blocking our way. We held out until intermission (at least there was an intermission -- we'd wanted to walk out of Drowning Girls the previous month, but were stuck in the back row with no escape possible outside of running across the water-covered stage), grabbed our things, headed to the door -- and ran into an associate of hubby's, who has something to do with the production. We cheerfully lied and avoided eye contact, then made excuses about going to the bathroom and ran out of the theatre, never to return.
Seriously, never. We got season tickets as an experiment, and understand now what a mistake that was. The Gateway is not a good theatre. It just seems that it's the only thing going in on Richmond.
Some Highlights:
The trick with the elephant (although it was ruined immediately by a fart joke).
My daring escape at intermission.
