'Around the World': a cheerful journey

To say that Laura Eason of the Lookingglass Theatre is not the first to adapt Jules Verne's 1873 novel "Around the World in 80 Days" to another form is a bit like saying that the late Charles Schulz wasn't averse to sticking Snoopy on a few lunchboxes.

The venerable tale of Phileas Fogg—a traveling man back cramped middle seats and three-hour delays at O'Hare weren't yet de rigueur—has been turned into everything from musicals to cartoons to mini-series to board games. It's indicative of our perpetual yearning for global adventure and the creative importance of letting great literary works finally pass into the public domain.

In some ways, "Around the World" is a straightforward yarn in the retro-adventure tradition recently exploited by the publishers of "The Dangerous Book for Boys." Herein, the British patrician Fogg makes a bet with his pals at the Reform Club that he can traverse the globe in precisely 1,920 hours. Despite a saboteur named Fix on his trail, Fogg and his long-suffering man-servant Passepartout traverse the globe by train, steamer, elephant and sled. (No balloon. That was a Hollywood invention.)

But if you want to look deeper, you can.

Fogg, whose upper lip never quivers and who throws money at every problem, is the living embodiment of no-nonsense British colonialism, replete with the great English fantasy of a subservient Frenchman, created, ironically, by a French author. In some takes on this story, Fogg seems to grow and change. In others, he remains consistently English. Which could also be the point.

Is Fogg, who can neither be flustered nor swayed from his straight-arrow purpose, a symbol of human technological progress and our perennial quest to tame our universe? (Verne, after all, was one of the fathers of science fiction). Or is Fogg a symbol of all the trouble caused by Westerners with an idea and a wallet?

Or is he both at once?

The dominant impulse of the new Lookingglass version—directed and adapted by Eason—is satirical. Suitable for families with kids 8 and older, the mood of the show remains light, cheerful and greatly entertaining. With Kevin Douglas' droll Passepartout at the comedic helm, a skilled cast of comedians—such talents as Joe Dempsey, Ericka Ratcliff, Rom Barkhordar and Nick Sandys—plays a bevy of international eccentrics, many of whom could be farcical refuges from a Peter Sellers movie.

Eason's staging is full of the visual imagination we've come to expect from Lookingglass—highlights include a map of the journey replete with models, the jaw-dropping creation of a elephant, and a clever little metaphor wherein a pair of seemingly self-propelled teacups serve as the embodiment for both the sway of the sea and the growing affection between Philip R. Smith's Fogg and Mrs. Aouda (Ravi Batista), the fascinating woman he meets on his travels.

It's all a great deal of fun.

This show, however, does not greatly engage the emotions.

That's partly because the narrative drive of the journey often is subsumed by all the clever little episodes therein. Unlike, say, the simpler but more cohesive and tonally secure Lifeline Theatre adaptation in 2003, the overall stakes here aren't high enough to fully stir the adventurer in all our souls and to get us to fully invest in Fogg's journey, with all of its dodgy implications. The show seems amused and entertained by the prospect of such a journey—and laudably committed to its theatricality—but not fully engaged with its risk or romance.

And thus the piece doesn't achieve the complexity it might. It also pays too little attention tothe restless soul of the wanderer. You can see the beginnings of where this could have gone—or maybe still could go—in Smith's central performance.

Smith is a fine, resonant actor whose heart always seems to reside just below the surface of his eyes. You sense that he wants to take his character on the kind of emotionally transformational global journey that I think Verne intended—Smith's style is quite different from anyone else in this show. But somehow the rules of this theatrical universe won't yet fully let this traveler emerge from his own trip.

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