Editor’s note: Orson Welles and Cole Porter’s “Around The World” was recently staged as a benefit in London’s Sadler’s Wells. It will come to New York City’s Mint Theater on December 6-12.
By SETH ALEXANDER THÉVOZ
LONDON – In later years, Orson Welles observed that his short-lived musical adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days was the theatrical work he was proudest of, and one can see why. Heartily praised by Bertolt Brecht, it presented a dazzlingly ambitious combination of styles and genres, wrapped up in the wholesome, mainstream form of a frothy Broadway musical.
In many ways, the Lost Musicals revival of this rare work sounds ominous: a notoriously elaborate musical with thirty-eight sets reduced to a semi-staged production with no scenery; the seventy-strong cast dressed in $50,000 of wardrobe and props whittled down to nine actors in evening wear; the thirty-three-piece orchestra transformed into a single piano. Yet such figures underestimate the versatility and infectious gusto of the cast. Around the World is unashamedly a romp, and the audience is invited to share in the fun.
The most striking thing is the musical’s breathless, breezy pace – for admirers of Welles’s radio work, this is familiar territory, with the rapid jumping from one scene to the next. But more surprising to admirers of Welles’s films is the musical’s lightweight tone. The director often complained that people associated him with sober, serious films because those were the ones which he was successful in getting financed; yet many of his unproduced scripts were broad comedies, satires and farces, like The Unthinking Lobster (published in France as Miracle à Hollywood, 1952); and a glimpse of the playful, tongue-in-cheek Welles onscreen can be found in his remarkable TV pilot, The Fountain of Youth (1956). Around the World was very much in this vein, and to those who do not see Welles as a popular director, this show presents a strong counter-argument, forgoing art-house imagery in favour of sheer entertainment. But being a Welles musical, nobody could call it uncomplicated.
Orson Welles’s script took considerable liberties with Jules Verne’s often clinical tale, and many changes transformed Around the World into a consummate populist musical. Passepartout becomes an American (of French descent), Pat Passepartout. He acquires a love interest, Fogg’s Irish maid Molly Muggins, who discreetly follows the travellers around the world, using money that fell out of Fogg’s bag. The production ends with a musical number over a dual wedding of Passepartout & Molly, and Fogg & Aouda. If these things seem overly contrived, it’s because the genre is contrived, and the whole thing works beautifully because it’s carried out so shamelessly.
Fogg as written by Welles is arguably more faithful to the literary Fogg than in any of the subsequent screen adaptations. Welles clearly liked Fogg, changing the plot to make him more heroic. It is Fogg who saves Aouda from the funeral pyre, not Passepartout; and it is Fogg who voluntarily offers himself as a sacrifice to Sioux warriors so as to save his friends, rather than having Passepartout captured by the Sioux. Yet the character deliberately remains a tremendous bore, and his opening song ‘There He Goes, Mr. Phileas Fogg’ makes it clear that he is also extremely conceited, highly satisfied at his station in life as an asexual bachelor. By contrast, Welles dismissed David Niven’s widely-admired 1956 film interpretation: ‘a delightful actor, (but) all wrong for the lead. The whole point of Fogg is that he isn’t any sort of a swinger, but, rather, the supreme square of all time. Niven, you know, wears his hat on the side of his head.’ Welles’s thoughts on this role were clear from his own exaggeratedly stiff portrayal of Fogg for a 1938 Mercury Theatre radio adaptation, which employed the same bored, weary English accent he had used to play Sherlock Holmes a month earlier.
One of the thematic additions of the script is the recurring mockery of the British Empire. When Aouda observes that it is India inside the British Empire which grows much of the opium that is consumed in China, Fogg takes from this the lesson ‘What a shame China is not part of the British Empire!’ whilst the whole song ‘The Flags of Old England’ is an affectionate parody of English stereotypes, right down to old school ties, fox hunting, and G&Ts, sung by Fogg so enthusiastically while he is tied up and on the brink of being burned alive, that his captors rapturously join in. The play’s setting near the height of the British Empire was thus a heaven-sent opportunity to send up both Britain, and colonialism.
It is understandable why the role of Inspector Fix appealed to Welles. In narrative terms, it echoes Franz Kindler in The Stranger (1946), and foreshadows Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil (1958); the character is technically an antagonist who plays second-fiddle to the lead, but he drives the action, and would have given Welles the opportunity to shine. In the course of the play, Fix poses as a Greek tourist in Port Said, a Chinese traveller in India, a British sea captain in Hong Kong, and a Southern dandy in California. One can easily imagine Welles with his radio background relishing the opportunity to leap from one accent to another. Similarly, the role would have also stretched Welles’s abilities in the art of quick change, complete with blonde and red-headed wigs, if the dialogue is anything to go by. (In this pared-down 2013 production, much was made of Fix claiming to engage in a quick change, and coming back on stage in exactly the same clothes.) The character was also assisted by Cole Porter’s recurring motif whenever Fix walked on, strangely reminiscent of Gounod’s ‘Funeral March of a Marionette’, which so famously came to be associated with Alfred Hitchcock a decade later. The one flaw in turning Fix into a master of disguise is that it does open up glaring plot holes. In the original novel, it was natural for the overbearing, macho Southern Colonel to duel with Fogg. But with Fix playing the Colonel, it is nonsensical that he should risk a death in a duel simply as a delaying tactic for the arrival of his warrant to arrest Fogg.
As noted, the 2013 cast presents an admirable degree of versatility. David Firth displays wonderful timing in capitalising on Fogg’s stiffness for full comic effect. Aside from the five principal roles of Fogg, Passepartout, Fix, Aouda and Molly, it was left to the remaining four members of the cast – Rob Eyles, Nicholas Jones, Michael Roberts and James Vaughan – to take up every supporting role, and play a wide variety of servants, bureaucrats, rivals, irritants, and even telegraph wires. Special mention must go to Roberts, for his memorable drag-act rendition of the San Francisco Madam Lola, played as an instantly recognisable impression of Marlene Dietrich (a nice touch, given her portrayal of the same role in the 1956 film).
One of the drawbacks of such a pared-down adaptation is that we don’t get much of a sense of the five silent film inserts that were used to create atmosphere between scenes. This is, of course, of great topical interest given the recent discovery of filmed inserts for Too Much Johnson (1938). Only one Around the World film segment is reconstructed (live, rather than on film), presumably due to its importance to the narrative: in the second act, the Bank of England robber decides to break and enter Fogg’s apartment, foolishly lights a match when Passepartout had left the gas running, and promptly is exploded. At the end of the play Fix quips ‘The robber has been discovered…well, what was left of it.’
There is, unfortunately, a dark side to the play, and one which is difficult to ignore: casual racism in its treatment of Chinese, Indians, Japanese and Native Americans. It’s as much a flaw of the original source material as anything, and Welles had a solid track record as a vocal advocate of civil rights for minorities all through the 1930s and 1940s – indeed, Catherine Benamou has shown how it was his determination to promote Latin American actors which led to RKO firing him from It’s All True (1942). Nonetheless, dialogue portraying British-ruled Indians as little more than savages cannot help but offend modern audiences, and the play suffers from too many crude stereotypes used to get a cheap laugh. Such racial stereotyping has not prevented other, more dated musicals from enjoying continued success – most notably the depiction of the Chinese characters in Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, which is rather similar to their depiction here. Nonetheless, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Should these elements be censored? That depends very much on the context the musical is promoted in. In this context, as a resurrection of a ‘lost musical’, it’s admirable that the production seeks to faithfully reproduce so much of Welles’s original vision. However, if Around the World were ever resurrected for a mass audience in a full-scale production, it may well be prudent to excise some of the more flagrant instances.
How ‘Wellesian’ is Around the World? The use of sound is certainly pure Welles; a constant series of jarring jolts and changes of scenery, ensuring the audience is kept awake. This choppy, jumpy quality, also found in his radio work, foreshadows the choppy, jumbled approach to editing he would take in his later film projects. But is it typical for the stage Welles? It’s hard to say. Unlike Richard France’s outstanding study of Welles’s pre-1941 stage work, his later stage work has eluded a similar level of study (apart from the attention paid by Michael Anderegg to his Shakespearean plays). Welles was coming out of a five-year lull in stage direction when he made this (unless one counts his 1943 Mercury Wonder Show, which was more of a song-and-dance variety act). He hadn’t directed a musical since The Cradle Will Rock (1938). And Around the World clearly tried to confuse and dazzle its audiences. Is it fair to compare it to Welles’s earlier stage work? Arguably, it shares more in common with the style of his later work.
It is also because of this jumpy, choppy quality that it would have worked so well as a film – perhaps even better than on the stage. Welles did actually shoot several days of footage for an Around the World film, in Morocco, during the Othello shoot in 1948-49. Judging by Welles’s inventive use of extensive location shooting in both The Lady from Shanghai (1948) and Othello (1952) made around this time, Around the World on film would have benefited from this vivid collage of different international locations – perhaps similar in style to the jarring whip-pans between countries found in Mr. Arkadin (1955). Certainly, whereas the Mike Todd-produced Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) is a slow, gentle travelogue, the emphasis in Around the World is on pace and change.
How much was Todd’s 1955 film influenced by the stage production? Given that Todd served as a producer on this musical, Welles was often asked how much overlap there was between the two. This performance bears out his insistence that relatively little overlap was to be found – he argued that only ‘little things’ were carried over, like the film’s gratuitous use of clips from George Méliès, arguably influenced by the musical basing its set designs on Méliès’s films. Yet none of Welles’s embellishments to the plot made their way into the film, whilst the film created its own original embellishments, most notably inventing numerous extra incidents in Europe, to make the most of the European scenery.
Despite reasonable ticket sales for the slow summer months in 1946, the musical’s high production costs meant that it lost a fortune. Would it have been a success if it had then transferred to the London stage, as Alexander Korda had originally planned? Quite possibly – London had never seen anything like it. Then again, the London stage had never seen anything like Welles’s inventive Moby Dick – Rehearsed (1955), and that flopped. We may never know. Would a full-scale staging find a mass audience today? Probably not – as with much of Welles’s work, it’s probably too much of a mixture of styles and genres to find a ‘core’ audience.
Until revived in 2007, Around the World existed in only one form, as a heavily-truncated thirty-minute 1946 radio broadcast, as the premiere of The Mercury Summer Theatre on the Air, produced to promote the show on Broadway. It still gives a good insight into Porter’s musical score. Understandably, much was lost in the abridgement, with Verne’s story being hopelessly oversimplified, and none of the majesty or complexity of Welles’s staging was captured. In his Welles biography, Simon Callow dismissed the broadcast as ‘bedlam’ and ‘incomprehensible’, and this is typical of how the abridgement has reflected badly on the original show. It is thus highly welcome to be able to once again see – in some form – this unique collaboration between Welles and Porter in adapting Verne. It’s certainly an oddity, and a quirky mixture of the populist middlebrow and the old-fashioned roadshow extravaganza. But it’s also terrific fun. There was a real buzz from the audience, as they left clearly impressed: ‘I hadn’t expected it to be quite so good!’ exclaimed the lady in front of me.
Seth Alexander Thévoz is a historian of Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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