Sunday, October 19, 2003

Seaside Music Theater going around world on stage

By LAURA STEWART
NEWS-JOURNAL FINE ARTS WRITER

DAYTONA BEACH — Even in this post-Concorde era, well after humans left footprints on the moon and probed Mars, “Around the World in 80 Days” still evokes wonder.

That’s why Seaside Music Theater chose to open its winter season this week with a new adaptation of Jules Verne’s 130-year-old novel.

“It’s a fabulous version of a great travel fantasy — I loved it and wanted to do it here,” said Lester Malizia, Seaside’s general manager and director of the play that runs through Nov. 2 at the company’s Beach Street theater, SMT Downtown.

The wonder isn’t just at the amazing speed of the trip Phileas Fogg (Jay Douglas) made with his manservant Passepartout (Gary Cadwallader). It’s at the exotic adventures the duo has as they take any and every vehicle available — boat, train, hot-air balloon, elephant — to win a bet. Nor is the wonder because just a few years after the book became an international hit and then a play that another gamble broke Fogg’s fictional record.

In 1889, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World sent reporter Nellie Bly on a trip around the world — in fewer than 80 days. Not only would the famously gutsy investigative reporter break the record as she traveled with just one valise, she would meet with Verne along the way, and give travel writing a distinctive spin. The World had a goal: to “undertake the task of turning a dream into reality,” as the New York newspaper announcement of its travel stunt stated.

Verne’s dream already was coming true, as globe-trotting — and writing about it — became a popular pastime. Like other books he wrote — among them “Journey to the Center of the Earth” (1864), “From the Earth to the Moon” (1865) and “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” (1869) — “Around the World in 80 Days” (1873) sprang from the French author’s very rich imagination, and his lifelong love of exploration, mostly from his library and armchair.

“I must be slightly off my head,” Verne wrote his publisher, Pierre Jules Hetzel. “I get caught up in the extraordinary adventures of my heroes. I regret only one thing, not being able to accompany them.”

Still, Verne did travel on foot as much as he could during his lifetime, 1828 to 1905. Born and raised in the French port of Nantes, he followed his father into law — or at least to law school — in Paris. But, after his uncle introduced him to key figures in the arts, the young Verne began to write. His first play was performed in 1840 and, after reading Edgar Allan Poe in translation, Verne wrote his first science-fiction story, the 1851 “Voyage in a Balloon.”

More than 65 novels, 30 plays, 20 short stories and essays and numerous geographical works and opera librettos brought Verne success and audiences all over the world. He did it at a literary pace that almost matches Fogg and Passepartout as they wing it across the globe. For more than 40 years, he produced at least a book a year, always drawing on both his imagination and research.

Unlike H.G. Wells, his English contemporary who is also credited with inventing science fiction, Verne believed his inventions and adventures were scientifically possible. They just weren’t necessarily inventions Verne knew, or adventures he actually had experienced.

Translated into many languages, “Around the World in 80 Days” and Verne’s other stories quickly mutated into technology that must have amazed the visionary author in his day, and would have astonished him later. “From the Earth to the Moon” inspired George Melies 1902 movie, while “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” was first filmed in 1907.

“Around the World in 80 Days” brought Verne his greatest theatrical acclaim when it hit the boards in the 1870s, and had its first revival during Bly’s around-the-world stunt.

It became a “Musical Extravaganza in Two Acts” in 1946, with music and lyrics by Cole Porter and an adaptation by its director, Wells. David Niven and Cantinflas starred as the globe-trotting duo in Mike Todd’s 1956 blockbuster movie, a production that included a young Shirley MacLaine and cameos by Marlene Dietrich, Buster Keaton, Cesar Romero, Frank Sinatra and many others.

The major film version, written by John Farrow and S.J. Perelman, was followed recently by a TV special, starring Pierce Brosnan, and several adaptations.

The one that impressed Malizia was written by Mark Brown, who oversaw its production in 2000 at the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival. In it, once again, Brown has Fogg betting his fellow gentlemen in London that he can speed around the world in only 80 days — and winning his bet.

But the pace in Brown’s new adaptation is fast, and gives the perennial favorite not only innovative narratives and entertaining parodies of melodrama, but also satisfyingly old-fashioned storytelling.

All that might make Seaside’s “Around the World in 80 Days” familiar to its author — but also a fantastic adventure. After all, it’s been a long, long time since machines that are heavier than air took to the air, long enough to make Verne’s vision seem both quaintly humanistic and classically science fiction.