If ever there were a perfect match between a production and its audience, it's FST's whirl Around the World in 80 Days. Against a backdrop mapping out the globe's two spheres, marvelously stiff-upper-lipped Phileas Fogg (Dan Matisa) races to win his bet with fellow 1872 Reform Club members to accomplish the play's titular feat. What complicates the journey further is a bank robbery that Detective Fix (Eric Hissom, a combined pseudo-Sherlock and bumbling Clouseau) aims to pin on Fogg. Simple props like straight-back chairs and a card table get arranged, re-arranged, embellished to suggest train seats, various business offices, and whatever else calls on the audience to use our imaginations. (Picture a tea party during an elephant ride via stacked seats.)
Sometimes Fogg's new manservant Passepartout (Brad DePlanche, amazingly funny in and out of accent) comes up close to show us pictures from a book. If we're not surprised when he flirts outrageously with women on the aisle, we may be taken aback at what Fix hooks onto. Except for Mahira Kakkar, first as a newsboy but mostly as Alouda, who provides both an adventure (she must be saved from a funeral pyre in India) and a romantic lead, almost everyone that Fogg, Passepartout, and Fix meet -- across oceans, in cities from Bombay to Hong Kong to San Francisco to New York, through vast prairies and deserts, even in an opium den -- is played (to the hilt) by Sheffield Chastain. Slyly to outrageously, he makes as many changes (smoking jacket, uniforms, Wild West regalia, workmen's to stinky Mountain Man's clothes) as does the weather (sunshine, rain, typhoon, snow).
With Matisa sturdily supplying a mast, comic sails whip in all directions. Every time, every way Fix's chase is foiled has us smiling. There's a running joke about Passepartout's mistaken name for the detective. Visual as well as verbal puns abound. Even if we've seen the movie, the play is novel in all but the plot. The play's major purpose -- to which director Russsell Treyz and cast give full service -- seems to be to make us laugh. In that respect, we find it every bit as much a winner as Phileas Fogg's bet.
