Stampeding Elephants! Raging Typhoons! Runaway Trains! City Rep Theatre Goes ‘Around the World in 80 Days’

Actor Beau Wade says he plays “eight characters or so” in City Repertory Theatre’s production of “Around the World in 80 Days,” the madcap comedy that the Palm Coast troupe is staging tonight, Saturday and Sunday at the outdoor, tented, socially distanced pavilion of the Palm Coast Arts Foundation.

“. . . or so”? A few days from opening night and Wade — a City Rep veteran who has starred in “The Rocky Horror Show,” “Little Shop of Horrors” and a half-gazillion other area theater productions – is fuzzy on how many characters he’s portraying in Mark Brown’s 2001 adaptation of Jules Verne’s 1872 adventure novel?

No, Wade and his co-stars, including Bethany Stillion, who portrays 16, 18 or 19 characters – assessments vary among her, cast and crew – aren’t suffering from some sort of pandemic lockdown lunacy. Rather, it’s just the nature of the play, in which Phileas Fogg, a Victorian-era Londoner played by Brent Jordan, bets the fellow members of his gentlemen’s club that he can travel around the world in 80 days.

And so Fogg and his valet Passepartout, played by Danno Waddell, set out to circle the globe, pursued by a police detective (one of Wade’s eight roles) who believes Fogg committed a robbery. Their journey runs from London to Suez, India, China, the American West, Chicago, New York and back to London.

While director John Sbordone and company are coy about how the play’s promotional teasers are realized – “Stampeding elephants! Raging typhoons! Runaway trains!” – the script notes that the cast “may be expanded to 39 actors.” City Rep, however, has opted for a more traditional staging, in which five actors typically portray the 39 roles. However, Sbordone notes there’s actually a sixth actor: sound effects artist Angela Young, who will add the appropriate sonic parts from a table offstage as the globe-trotting shenanigans unfold onstage.

“I think this is the most complicated thing I’ve worked on in 50 years,” says Sbordone, who cofounded CRT in 2011 and has directed such heavyweight fare as Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” David Mamet’s “Race,” David Ives’ “Venus in Fur” and Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage.” “There’s just so much happening, so much constantly happening. And then we have to make each scene completely different. How many boats do we do? Two, three, four different boats?”

When Stillion chimes in with “two boats, a sledge and four different trains, I think,” and Brittany Tellis, who says she plays “three or four roles,” adds “and an elephant,” Sbordone deadpans: “Maybe that’s the title of the show – ‘Four Trains, Two boats, a Sledge and an Elephant.’ ”

But, unlike the 1956 film starring David Niven, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Sbordone adds: “There’s no balloon. Make sure the audience knows we don’t have a balloon.” (“Around the World” is often confused with Verne’s earlier “Five Weeks in a Balloon,” the 1863 novel that made his reputation and established the template of imperious discovery with a human face.)

An 1874 stage version, co-written by Verne and his fellow Frenchman, playwright Adolphe d’Ennery, who’d adapted Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” for the stage, made him rich, running for several decades, but not nearly as rich as he should have been: Edouard Cadol, a troll of a playwright who had briefly worked with d’Ennery on the stage adaptation had registered the name of the play in his own name, and demanded half the royalties for life, though he’d not written a single line. Repelled by a long court fight and unaware that his play would run for decades, Verne settled on those very terms, giving away a fortune. The success hasn’t stopped. Brown says on his website that it’s “crazy” his play has been so successful, having been “produced Off-Broadway twice, all across the U.S., Canada, England, South Africa, Turkey, India and Bangladesh – it’s even been produced in the Himalayas.”

Yet the play has been off the radar of Central Florida theater: Only City Rep crewman Jerry Lapidus can recall another local production — when Daytona Beach’s Seaside Music Theater staged it in 2003.

However, “Around the World” was the perfect candidate to become CRT’s third production during the pandemic. When City Rep and the Palm Coast Arts Foundation mutually agreed to forgo their annual February production of Shakespeare in the Park, “I was looking for something to fill that space that would be epic, need few actors and would be audience-terrific,” says Sbordone, who confesses he wasn’t familiar with the Verne adaptation before his search.

“I knew there were movies, of course, and I read the Jules Verne novel 50 years ago,” he says. “I took a look at the play and it sounded great. This is a classic story, and five actors fulfills our mission of giving actors challenges.”

And, Sbordone and his actors note, a smaller cast, plus the advantage of using PCAF’s outdoor pavilion, means social distancing and other Covid protocols could be managed more thoroughly.

As for the challenge of playing multiple roles, Wade’s loose assessment of his tally – “eight or so” – is more understandable when he details the work involved: “Some of the roles are really quick – one little scene, for five lines. Sometimes all of us will just say stuff as actor one, actor two, actor three – is that a role? That’s why it gets questionable. It’s fun because this guy just needs a funny voice, while this guy needs a whole back story, and Detective Fix is my character throughout the whole play.”

Stillion’s 18 or so roles are “extremely challenging,” she says. “I’ve frequently been in shows where I’ve played multiple characters. How many characters were in ‘Shakespeare Abridged’? (The play was CRT’s first post-pandemic lockdown show.) Maybe more than 18, but who’s counting? I think this is a record. It’s a great exercise for an actor to be given multiple roles in a show. It’s very demanding.”

She pauses then paraphrases German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger.”

“Around the World in 80 Days,” a City Repertory Theatre production directed by John Sbordone, at 7 p.m. Feb. 25-27 and 3 p.m. Feb. 28. Performances will be at the Palm Coast Arts Foundation pavilion, in Town Center, 1500 Central Ave., Palm Coast. Tickets are $20 general admission, $15 students with ID. Tickets are available at crtpalmcoast.com, by calling the CRT box office at 386-585-9415, or at the door the day of the show. Patrons are expected to wear masks.