theater

Since its first dippy incarnation, Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has been everything from a stage play to a cheaply made British television program starring BBC-TV stalwarts Simon Jones and David Dixon as the Earth man and his alien buddy touring the universe(s), thumbs out. Seeing as the iridescent chintz of that show made Dr. Who seem lustrous in comparison, 2005's big-scale film production was necessary to Hollywood—and unnecessary to viewers. The Mos Def movie forgot that it's the clunkiness of Adams' take on space, and Arthur Dent's and Ford Prefect's roles—as heard on the original BBC radio show in 1978—that made Hitchhiker zing, not to mention the wry script.

Curio Theatre director Jared Reed went back to the source: Adams' radio scripts. He's created a new multimedia stage version of the sky-fi comedy—but with local illustrators Nonthaporn and Ray Saunders tucking into a living storyboard of filmed and stage-set animation, while "voice" actors Susan Jude, Drew Petersen and Jerry Rudasill chew through the silly Brit whimsy. Reed promises a unique expansion of Adams' truly original vision. "It will become history—good or bad," jokes Reed about the swollen-Ralph Steadman-on-steroids look of his illustrators' characterizations, set against the trippiest of galaxies. "We're trying to merge illustration, cinema and voice," says Reed. "I don't think this has been done before onstage. We might just find out why." Trust in this, Curio: It can't be worse than the movie.