There’s no better month for a ghost story than October and no better place for Halloween chills this year than the City Of Roses as Pasadena Playhouse trick-or-treats audiences to the The Woman In Black, the West End smash comedy thriller staged just as Londoners have been eating it up nonstop since 1989.

 Stephen Malatratt’s stage adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1983 Victorian-era gothic novella is as clever and theatrical as stage adaptations get.

Rather than tell its traumatized protagonist’s tale of terror the old-fashioned way, Malatratt has adapted The Woman In Black as a two-hander with one actor as our horrified hero/narrator and the other in all supporting roles save the titular black-clad ghost, then adds an ingenious play-within-a-play twist.

 London solicitor Arthur Kipps (Bradley Armacost) has hired The Actor (Adam Wesley Brown) to help theatricalize his adventures in terror, and help is precisely what Kipps will need given the length of his manuscript—it will take five hours to read it aloud and likely bore an audience to tears—and its author’s decided lack of thespian skills.

And so The Actor offers to assume the role of story-teller/protagonist and enlists Kipps to portray the folk he meets on his journey from London to the coastal village of Crythin Gifford where an elderly widowed client has recently met her demise … and miracle of miracles, the previously talentless Arthur proves more than up to the task.

 It’s at Mrs. Drablow’s funeral that Kipps first spots The Woman In Black, though this is hardly the last time the mysteriously shrouded figure will pop up as the mystified solicitor investigates her identity and, once he’s figured out that she’s a ghost, the cause of her death.

Like Patrick Barlow’s hit Broadway adaptation of John Buchan and Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, much of the pleasure in watching Malatratt’s stage take on The Woman In Black comes from seeing a single actor’s transformation from character to character at the blink of an eye (or switch of an accent or hat) and Armacost has the time of his acting life playing the initially not-ready-for-his-close-up Mr. Kipps; Mr. Bentley, who sends Arthur on his mission; Mr. Bentley’s clerk Tomes; landowner Sam Daily, whom Arthur meets aboard the train to Crythin Gifford and who becomes his loyal sidekick; the Landlord of the Gifford Arms; Alice Drablow’s land agent Mr. Jerome, who escorts Arthur to the graveyard where she is to be buried; and Mr. Keckwick, whose pony and trap transports Arthur to the tall, gaunt house Mrs. Drablow had called home.

 The sheer theatricality of Malatratt’s adaptation delights as well, enlisting the audience’s imagination in picturing the hustle and bustle of a London train station, Keckwick’s horse and carriage, a dog named Spider, and a raging storm, thanks in part to “recorded sound” only recently become a trick of Victorian theater.

 As he did back when The Woman In Black first opened at Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre two years before its West End debut, Robin Herford directs its PW Productions/Pemberly Productions National Tour with supreme visual panache and an absolute awareness of how to make an audience gasp en masse,

 Herford and his associate director Magdalene Spanuello are aided in no small measure by Michael Holt’s deceptively simple scenic design, one that reveals multiple surprises behind its empty-theater facade, by Kevin Steep’s mysterious and spooky shadows-and-light lighting design, and by Gareth Owen’s surround-sound design (based on Ron Mead’s original and packed with multiple shock effects).

 Holt’s costumes merit snaps as well, particularly the quick changes he provides Armacost’s multiple characters.

 A Chicago-based cast delivers separate-but-equal tour-de-force performances, Armacost not only acing the initially dull-as-dishwater Kipps but the multitude of quirky characters into whom he vanishes, while Brown commands the stage as both The Actor whom Kipps enlists and as a man embarking on the most frightening of adventures.

Dialect coach Eva Breneman ensures pitch-perfect accents.

 Assisting the production’s original creative team in keeping their vision fresh and alive on tour are  Anshuman Bhatia (associate set and lighting designer), kClaire McKellaston (associate costume designer), and Ray Nardelli (associate lighting designer).

Casting is by Laura Stanczyk, CSA. Simon Hedger and Nick Vidal are understudies. Chloe Baldwin mystifies as The Vision.

David A. Loranca is production stage manager and Annie Zaruba-Walker is assistant stage manager.

It’s taken over thirty years for Robin Herford’s original U.K. vision of Stephen Mallatratt’s splendiferous take on Susan Hill’s The Woman In Black to make it from Yorkshire to London to Pasadena, but it’s been worth the wait. You won’t have more scarifying Halloween fun all month.

Pasadena Playhouse, 39 South El Molino Ave., Pasadena.
www.pasadenaplayhouse.org

–Steven Stanley
October 18, 2018
Photos: Roger Mastroianni

Tags: Los Angeles Theater Review, Pasadena Playhouse, Stephen Malatratt, Susan Hill