About the Project
The recording of an announcer speaks of the illustrious performer that everyone has come to see – Nelly Bly!
Nellie introduces herself, then sings a song with period recorded music, however with words and movement that recount humorously the Wild West Shows starring heroes like Will Rogers, Buffalo Bill, Calamity Jane and Annie Oakley that can’t beat her own Wild WORLD show! Nellie’s show recounts her traveling around the world, sending dispatches to her New York newspaper of her travels, as she tries to beat the record of the fictional character Phileas Fogg of traveling around the world in 80 days.
Nellie reads her first suggestion to her publisher that she make the journey. A year later we hear her side of an imagined conversation as she says yes, she can be ready in two days to begin the journey. As she holds the conversation we see her packing underwear, the 200 British pounds the newspaper provides in a cord around her neck, and precious little else as she dons her coat and heads offstage to the sound of the steamer announcing its departure at 9:40am, November 14, 1889, from New York to London.
She arrives in London and sends her first dispatch back to the New York World newspaper.
We continue to follow her in moments of humor, pathos, re-enactments and songs she sings that are appropriate to the period and country she is in, though often with new words.
The story is based on her correspondence and later books on her trip that takes in France, Italy, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and San Francisco, with visits to Jules Verne and a Chinese leper colony, as well as her acquiring a monkey in Japan. The humor that we might expect in a Wild “World” Show – the monkey will be played by the traditional battery-operated monkey clapping two cymbals in its hands – combines with a story of adventure and very personal reflections made by Nellie about her life and passions.
All of which ends with her back in NYC – the first person to circle the globe in less than 80 days!
Production Team
