Vintage Hitchcock: A Review
I have had the great pleasure of being able to participate in Richmond Hill Players' 2022 production of Vintage Hitchcock. It is three short plays, adapted by Joe Landry, from Alfred Hitchcock films. They include The Lodger, Sabotage, and The 39 Steps.
Written in the style of a radio play, there are six actors playing multiple parts. For my part, I play Robert Bunting, proprietor of an inn in London, and Mr. Cannott, a witness at a coroner's inquest, in The Lodger. The Lodger dealt with a mysterious serial killer who went by the codename "The Avenger." Young, blonde women who frequented dance halls and had taken to drink were being targeted in 1888 London. Robert and Ellen have a daughter, as it happens, named Daisy. Daisy happens to fit into much of the criteria of the women who have been killed by the Avenger.
One night, late at night, a man who goes by the name of Sleuth shows up in the wind and rain at the boarding house operated by Robert and Ellen. He is willing to pay forty-two shillings a week for his room. He only asks to be left alone. He doesn't like laughter. He doesn't like music. He doesn't like drinking. He doesn't like having portraits of beautiful women staring him in the face in his room. Over the course of this roughly half-hour play, we learn that Mr. Sleuth always happens to be out at night taking a walk at the same time as each next murder. There's no alibi at the Buntings to say that he was there. It was inexplicable, of course, that my character, Robert, would think how delightful it would be to spend the forty-two shillings a week on getting rail fare to bring his daughter Daisy back. The parents want to have their daughter living with them in London. Inconceivable, I know, that the husband could be so dense. But Alfred Hitchcock is known for his dry humor, and I think this is just another element of his dry humor at work.
Mike Kelly plays the role of Sleuth. Mike has played a multitude of different characters before. I always get a big smile on my face when he came up to the mike as Sleuth. Self-righteous, moralistic, tolerant of neither the least bit of pleasure nor vice, Sleuth condescends to the hosts constantly.
Leigh Van Winkle plays the part of Ellen Bunting. Ellen is on to Sleuth a lot quicker than her husband Robert is.
Elizabeth Shaeffer plays the role of Daisy, the daughter who gets brought home, unbeknownst to Robert and Ellen that they have lured their own daughter right into the belly of the beast. Their boarding house has become the home operation for Sleuth.
I play Talbot, a Scotland Yard detective, among other characters, in the second play, Sabotage. This is the darkest of the three stories. Verloc, an Eastern European, operates a cinema in London in presumably the 1930's or 1940's. His wife, Winnie, is a southerner who has moved to England with him, along with her younger brother, Stevie. Stevie is played by Leigh Van Winkle. And Winkle is positively delightful as good, sweet, decent Stevie. Stevie is just thrilled to be taken out to a steak dinner with his big sister and the green grocer, Ted, who works right next door. Ted is played by Mike Kelly. He's an undercover cop. He reports to Talbot. Verloc has been becoming involved in acts of sabotage. It starts with throwing sand on the turbines in a power plant. It escalates to terrorism. His boss, Vladimir, also played by me, demands that they show London what real fear and terror are. He inteneds to have a bomb planted at Picadilly Circus during the height of weekend activity. Vladimir is diabolical, depraved, void of empathy, oblivious to human emotion, and all around lacking of any redeemable qualities.
In other words, I'm playing Vladimir Putin. I have based this part on him. Right down to the nefarious Russian accent.
Larry Lord plays Verloc. His wife in real life, Lorrie Lord, plays the role of Winnie. Will Verloc actually play along with Vladimir's treacherous plan for bomb planting? We watch Verloc proposition and gamble his humanity away bit by bit, like the luckless hero or well-intentioned antagonist in a Coen Brother's thriller. At some point, Verloc crosses a line of no return. And there are unintended consequences. In the streets of London, somebody innocent will perish because he was at Verloc's beck and call. I'm glad Larry Lord played the character. He imbued Verloc with humanity. So it's difficult to watch him get pulled down in the undertow of other people's evil and malicious plans.
I should also mention that I play the Professor, the bombmaker who is at least as crazy as Vladimir, I play the Bus Driver, a nameless streetcorner Salesman, Powerplant Worker # 2, patron # 2 at the movie theater, and Ted's boss at the Green Grocer.
After playing Vladimir and the Professor, the two masterminds whom you love to hate who happen to be behind the attacks on the very heart of London, it's always a relief to take off those characters, like an ugly, scratchy sweater, and resume playing the role of Talbot, a world-weary police detective who doesn't want to give anyone the benefit of a doubt, or more to the point, the suspects or anyone in the orbit of the prime suspects, the benefit of a doubt. He's a soft-spoken crimefighter who suffers no fools gladly.
This play is actually kind of dark, but there are bursts of levity, courtesy of Mike and Jim Skiles. The two brothers pull off amazing feats of practical sound effects, including horses clomping in a parade, thunder, wind, rain, a woman collapsing, doors opening, birds chirping, a gas oven lighting for heat, and vegetables being cut.
The third play of the night is The 39 Steps. This is my largest part of the night. But my character, Richard Hannay, is Canadian. And it's a traditional innocent man on the lam thriller with some comedy. So it's actually the easiest of the night for me, other than being on my feet a whole bunch, haha. I first meet a mysterious secret agent, played by Leigh Van Winkle, at the Mr. Memory Show in London. Mike Kelly plays the part of Mr. Memory. He memorizes fifty facts a day. And people pay to go and see him, then ask questions about random facts. He's basically like all of the cards in the Trivial Pursuit box.
And my character is putting up the secret agent, Anabella Smith, when she gets murdered.
She is aware of a secret organization trying to steal secrets from the Royal Air Defense. How the secrets are being transported out of the country is something Richard needs to find out. Who is carrying out the theft of secrets ? What are they going to do with the secrets? Sell them? Use them to scuttle our air defense? Make a direct attack on our infrastructure? The masterminds and the accomplices are whom my character, Richard Hannay, is trying to find. The secrets and the hard evidence of the plans are what he needs to find out. And he has to do so while being handcuffed to the pretty young Pamela Stewart for almost half of the play. She tries twice to turn him over to ahuthorities. Sje had every reason to do so, though. All of the newspapers have the headlines of Richard Hannay Escapes, Woman Found Dead in Richard Hannay's Apartment.
I absolutely loved working on this play. I have wanted to work with Mike Kelly for a long time. I've been a fan. Here, he does a great deal in lifting the characters off the page, and instilling it with a token of his own special identity. I have also wanted to work with Larry Lord and Lorrie Lord, ever since seeing them in Dearly Beloved. They are immensely talented performers. And they do a great job with their accents. It's a bit of an inside joke, and a cheeky one at that, that Larry and Lorrie play a married couple in Sabotage. I think having them in these roles contributes a layer of comedy that wasn't in the script. But I think that playwright Joe Landry, and for that matter Alfred Hitchcock, would approve. We've instilled Richmond Hill cheekiness by having a wife whose husband keeps dark secrets about his secret side hustle. And she is entitled to an ice queen moment upon the big reveal. It elicited a wave of chuckles, to be sure, in all five of the performances that we have done so far. Larry and Lori are team players and terrific sports for playing the roles that Jonathan and Ann had in mind for them.
Then there's Elizabeth Shaeffer, whom I was in Busybody with back in 2018. She's back, and she's great fun to work with in this show. She has a developed ability to speak in a British accent, which she utilized to great effect in Busybody. She also played the sweet young ingenue with my wife Sara in Murder on the Rerun. And she completely steals every scene that she's in.
Then there's Leigh Van Winkle, the actress I got to know in Meet Me in St. Louis back in 2012. It's fitting that Leigh was in that show, since that was my comeback after nearly three long years away from theater. And now, we're putting up Vintage Hitchcock, which finally found its way onto the calendar after nearly three long years of COVID. Leigh gets to play the lead in The Lodger, as Ellen, the worried sick co-owner of the boarding house who has more than her husband does when it comes to brains, and just wants to figure out how they can keep their daughter alive with a Hitchcockian villain running amuck and serial killing in the streets of Victorian London. She has great pluck. All the actresses did.
It goes without saying that Jonathan Grafft and Ann Keeney-Grafft made a high-wattage, spectacular team as director and stage manager. Thanks, SPECIAL THANKS to Ann for keeping a spare script on the stool just offstage, when I couldn't find my copy of Sabotage, when we were out on stage in the middle of performing the plays on this past Sunday's matinees.
You have three more opportunities to see Vintage Hitchcock! It is at Richmond Hill Players in Geneseo, Illinois, Friday, October 7th at 7:30 pm, Saturday, October 8th, also at 7:30, and Sunday, October 9th, but that one's a matinee, and it's at 3 pm.
Written in the style of a radio play, there are six actors playing multiple parts. For my part, I play Robert Bunting, proprietor of an inn in London, and Mr. Cannott, a witness at a coroner's inquest, in The Lodger. The Lodger dealt with a mysterious serial killer who went by the codename "The Avenger." Young, blonde women who frequented dance halls and had taken to drink were being targeted in 1888 London. Robert and Ellen have a daughter, as it happens, named Daisy. Daisy happens to fit into much of the criteria of the women who have been killed by the Avenger.
One night, late at night, a man who goes by the name of Sleuth shows up in the wind and rain at the boarding house operated by Robert and Ellen. He is willing to pay forty-two shillings a week for his room. He only asks to be left alone. He doesn't like laughter. He doesn't like music. He doesn't like drinking. He doesn't like having portraits of beautiful women staring him in the face in his room. Over the course of this roughly half-hour play, we learn that Mr. Sleuth always happens to be out at night taking a walk at the same time as each next murder. There's no alibi at the Buntings to say that he was there. It was inexplicable, of course, that my character, Robert, would think how delightful it would be to spend the forty-two shillings a week on getting rail fare to bring his daughter Daisy back. The parents want to have their daughter living with them in London. Inconceivable, I know, that the husband could be so dense. But Alfred Hitchcock is known for his dry humor, and I think this is just another element of his dry humor at work.
Mike Kelly plays the role of Sleuth. Mike has played a multitude of different characters before. I always get a big smile on my face when he came up to the mike as Sleuth. Self-righteous, moralistic, tolerant of neither the least bit of pleasure nor vice, Sleuth condescends to the hosts constantly.
Leigh Van Winkle plays the part of Ellen Bunting. Ellen is on to Sleuth a lot quicker than her husband Robert is.
Elizabeth Shaeffer plays the role of Daisy, the daughter who gets brought home, unbeknownst to Robert and Ellen that they have lured their own daughter right into the belly of the beast. Their boarding house has become the home operation for Sleuth.
I play Talbot, a Scotland Yard detective, among other characters, in the second play, Sabotage. This is the darkest of the three stories. Verloc, an Eastern European, operates a cinema in London in presumably the 1930's or 1940's. His wife, Winnie, is a southerner who has moved to England with him, along with her younger brother, Stevie. Stevie is played by Leigh Van Winkle. And Winkle is positively delightful as good, sweet, decent Stevie. Stevie is just thrilled to be taken out to a steak dinner with his big sister and the green grocer, Ted, who works right next door. Ted is played by Mike Kelly. He's an undercover cop. He reports to Talbot. Verloc has been becoming involved in acts of sabotage. It starts with throwing sand on the turbines in a power plant. It escalates to terrorism. His boss, Vladimir, also played by me, demands that they show London what real fear and terror are. He inteneds to have a bomb planted at Picadilly Circus during the height of weekend activity. Vladimir is diabolical, depraved, void of empathy, oblivious to human emotion, and all around lacking of any redeemable qualities.
In other words, I'm playing Vladimir Putin. I have based this part on him. Right down to the nefarious Russian accent.
Larry Lord plays Verloc. His wife in real life, Lorrie Lord, plays the role of Winnie. Will Verloc actually play along with Vladimir's treacherous plan for bomb planting? We watch Verloc proposition and gamble his humanity away bit by bit, like the luckless hero or well-intentioned antagonist in a Coen Brother's thriller. At some point, Verloc crosses a line of no return. And there are unintended consequences. In the streets of London, somebody innocent will perish because he was at Verloc's beck and call. I'm glad Larry Lord played the character. He imbued Verloc with humanity. So it's difficult to watch him get pulled down in the undertow of other people's evil and malicious plans.
I should also mention that I play the Professor, the bombmaker who is at least as crazy as Vladimir, I play the Bus Driver, a nameless streetcorner Salesman, Powerplant Worker # 2, patron # 2 at the movie theater, and Ted's boss at the Green Grocer.
After playing Vladimir and the Professor, the two masterminds whom you love to hate who happen to be behind the attacks on the very heart of London, it's always a relief to take off those characters, like an ugly, scratchy sweater, and resume playing the role of Talbot, a world-weary police detective who doesn't want to give anyone the benefit of a doubt, or more to the point, the suspects or anyone in the orbit of the prime suspects, the benefit of a doubt. He's a soft-spoken crimefighter who suffers no fools gladly.
This play is actually kind of dark, but there are bursts of levity, courtesy of Mike and Jim Skiles. The two brothers pull off amazing feats of practical sound effects, including horses clomping in a parade, thunder, wind, rain, a woman collapsing, doors opening, birds chirping, a gas oven lighting for heat, and vegetables being cut.
The third play of the night is The 39 Steps. This is my largest part of the night. But my character, Richard Hannay, is Canadian. And it's a traditional innocent man on the lam thriller with some comedy. So it's actually the easiest of the night for me, other than being on my feet a whole bunch, haha. I first meet a mysterious secret agent, played by Leigh Van Winkle, at the Mr. Memory Show in London. Mike Kelly plays the part of Mr. Memory. He memorizes fifty facts a day. And people pay to go and see him, then ask questions about random facts. He's basically like all of the cards in the Trivial Pursuit box.
And my character is putting up the secret agent, Anabella Smith, when she gets murdered.
She is aware of a secret organization trying to steal secrets from the Royal Air Defense. How the secrets are being transported out of the country is something Richard needs to find out. Who is carrying out the theft of secrets ? What are they going to do with the secrets? Sell them? Use them to scuttle our air defense? Make a direct attack on our infrastructure? The masterminds and the accomplices are whom my character, Richard Hannay, is trying to find. The secrets and the hard evidence of the plans are what he needs to find out. And he has to do so while being handcuffed to the pretty young Pamela Stewart for almost half of the play. She tries twice to turn him over to ahuthorities. Sje had every reason to do so, though. All of the newspapers have the headlines of Richard Hannay Escapes, Woman Found Dead in Richard Hannay's Apartment.
I absolutely loved working on this play. I have wanted to work with Mike Kelly for a long time. I've been a fan. Here, he does a great deal in lifting the characters off the page, and instilling it with a token of his own special identity. I have also wanted to work with Larry Lord and Lorrie Lord, ever since seeing them in Dearly Beloved. They are immensely talented performers. And they do a great job with their accents. It's a bit of an inside joke, and a cheeky one at that, that Larry and Lorrie play a married couple in Sabotage. I think having them in these roles contributes a layer of comedy that wasn't in the script. But I think that playwright Joe Landry, and for that matter Alfred Hitchcock, would approve. We've instilled Richmond Hill cheekiness by having a wife whose husband keeps dark secrets about his secret side hustle. And she is entitled to an ice queen moment upon the big reveal. It elicited a wave of chuckles, to be sure, in all five of the performances that we have done so far. Larry and Lori are team players and terrific sports for playing the roles that Jonathan and Ann had in mind for them.
Then there's Elizabeth Shaeffer, whom I was in Busybody with back in 2018. She's back, and she's great fun to work with in this show. She has a developed ability to speak in a British accent, which she utilized to great effect in Busybody. She also played the sweet young ingenue with my wife Sara in Murder on the Rerun. And she completely steals every scene that she's in.
Then there's Leigh Van Winkle, the actress I got to know in Meet Me in St. Louis back in 2012. It's fitting that Leigh was in that show, since that was my comeback after nearly three long years away from theater. And now, we're putting up Vintage Hitchcock, which finally found its way onto the calendar after nearly three long years of COVID. Leigh gets to play the lead in The Lodger, as Ellen, the worried sick co-owner of the boarding house who has more than her husband does when it comes to brains, and just wants to figure out how they can keep their daughter alive with a Hitchcockian villain running amuck and serial killing in the streets of Victorian London. She has great pluck. All the actresses did.
It goes without saying that Jonathan Grafft and Ann Keeney-Grafft made a high-wattage, spectacular team as director and stage manager. Thanks, SPECIAL THANKS to Ann for keeping a spare script on the stool just offstage, when I couldn't find my copy of Sabotage, when we were out on stage in the middle of performing the plays on this past Sunday's matinees.
You have three more opportunities to see Vintage Hitchcock! It is at Richmond Hill Players in Geneseo, Illinois, Friday, October 7th at 7:30 pm, Saturday, October 8th, also at 7:30, and Sunday, October 9th, but that one's a matinee, and it's at 3 pm.