Mel Brooks meets Alfred Hitchcock approach works for 'The 39 Steps'

The key question in "Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps" isn't whodunit. It's how they dunit.

Adapted by Patrick Barlow and Director Maria Aitkin, "The 39 Steps," now at Chicago's Bank of America Theatre, is a loving spoof of Hitchcock's 1935 spy thriller of the same name.

Four actors fill out more than 100 different roles, each with his or her own particular facial tics, manners of movement and accent. And if that's not enough, they move their own props - everything from lamp posts to chairs to window frames - transitioning from one over-the-top setting to the next without missing a beat.

Think the master of suspense meets Mel Brooks - all hopped up on Red Bull.

The adventure kicks off when Richard Hannay looks to escape his "dull little rented flat" with a night at the theater. He returns home with a mysterious dark-haired woman, and in no time at all is on the run from police who think Hannay's guilty of murder.

Taking a story from the silver screen to the stage often involves scaling back, but here it's accomplished with remarkable ingenuity and one wild wink to the world of entertainment. To recreate a chase scene atop a moving train, Hannay flaps his coat in the fake breeze, leaping from trunk to trunk. The Scottish moors are done with shadow puppets - complete with a tiny trademark Hitchcock "cameo." A shower curtain manned by a member of the cast fills in as a waterfall, and an instant crowd is created when two actors march on by shouldering a pole with costumes hanging off.

You don't need to have seen the original movie to enjoy "The 39 Steps." Still, it helps to have more than a passing knowledge of Hitchcock's work and other movies of the era to catch the fast-and-furious film references and the spot-on sendup of the acting styles of the '30s and '40s.

Hannay is played by Ted Deasy, drolly channeling the impeccably dressed pipe-smoking leading men of that era. Claire Brownell, meanwhile, plays a vampish spy, a blonde heroine and a mousy farmer's wife. Eric Hissom and Scott Parkinson dash about filling every other role, literally juggling two or three hats at a time. If at times they seem a tad miffed, it's all part of the fun.

That it works - and works brilliantly - is a credit to this fearless, flawless four-person cast and the "movement directors" (Toby Sedgwick and Christopher Bayes) obviously so vital to the flow. Hissom and Parkinson, in particular, pull off so many costume changes, accent variations and distinctive facial expressions that you happily buy into the escalating absurdity. In the end, how they do it doesn't matter - just that they do it so well.