On Good Friday at the Drury Lane Theatre in Oakbrook Terrace, Easter bunnies cheered up the lobby as the venue prepared for its famed holiday weekend brunch. Meanwhile, the theater was staging a show that (spoilers ahead) posited that Jesus of Nazareth may have borne a child with Mary Magdalene. Quite the disconnect. A trip from your seat to the concession stand was to pass through two entirely different worlds.
In all seriousness, it’s unlikely that “The Da Vinci Code” will undermine anyone’s faith. You’ll likely recall the Dan Brown novel, imagining a vast conspiracy theory involving Leonardo Da Vinci, the Priory of Sion cabal and the Catholic organization known as Opus Dei, all in service of covering up the existence of an ongoing bloodline emanating from Jesus.
Brown’s mystery, which has sold some 80 million copies over the last 22 years, became a hit 2006 film with Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou and sparked much interest in its, ahem, alternative religious history. It begins with a murder in the Louvre Museum where Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of religious symbolism and iconography (played at Drury Lane by Jeff Parker) has run into a young cryptologist named Sophie Neveu (Vaneh Assadourian). Together, the pursued pair set out on a fantastical quest, which leads them to an eccentric Englishman named Sir Leigh Teabing, played by Bradley Armacost. Will he lead our heroes to the Holy Grail? How much will we care?
Drury Lane’s production is directed by Elizabeth Margolius, a genuinely talented visual stylist who can achieve wonders when paired with the right material. And, indeed, there are a lot of cool digital design elements here from set designer Scott Penner and projections maestro Joshua Schmidt. But this script is not a great match for Margolius’ skills. It contains so much cascading plot that you can barely keep track of things, even without all of the additional visual accoutrements that mostly confuse, especially in the early stages, when surely unnecessary heavy French accents get in the way of comprehensibility. Things do get better as the show goes on and I admire the aims here, but this chilly show just doesn’t gel.
I suspect that Margolius wanted to genuinely theatricalize a script that basically just sticks the screenplay of the movie onto a stage and hopes audiences will follow along as the characters flit from place to place. But this uninspired text just cannot support what she is trying to achieve here. It’s too pedestrian an adaptation from Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel. Margolius would have better going back to the novel and creating her own, had that been allowed.
That said, if you are a fan of the novel or the film and want to be reminded of your experience, you’ll likely enjoy at least some of this show, staged with an experienced cast. I’m something of a Da Vinci obsessive myself and I remember reading Brown’s novel back in the day and being fascinated anew by this polyglot genius — an artist, futurist, tinkerer and thinker whose depths have yet to be fully plumbed. So there’s that. The show does make you want to head to Milan to look again at Da Vinci’s mysterious masterpiece.
I did ask the Easter Bunny what he thought of these ritualistic nightly goings on, presumably within his earshot, but alas I got no response.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “The Da Vinci Code” (2.5 stars)
When: Through June 1
Where: Dury Lane Theatre, 100 Drury Lane, Oakbrook Terrace
Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes
Tickets: $85-$165 at 630-530-8300 and drurylanetheatre.com
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