Long before the new (old) vogue for 3-D at the movies, the theater was all about it. Trap doors onstage, apparatus dropping from the ceiling, lighting and sound cues, sets moving and changing as in Terry Gilliam’s film homage to old-fashioned theatrics “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen”—indeed, the simple act of the actors on the stage, seemingly close enough to touch—all of it, when done right, registers as an experience that the audience feels it is a part of.

The new technically classy version of Jules Verne’s classic adventure “Around the World in 80 Days,” which débuted on January 29 at The Kansas City Repertory Theatre is Gilliamesque. The sets and the actors combine to create an illusion of travel, via locomotive or steamship or even elephant. The story recalls Verne’s popular 1873 novel (it was originally planned as a play, based on Verne’s own voyages); while there is a nod to the hokey 1956 Hollywood movie with David Niven as Phileas Fogg—Fogg’s servant, Passepartout asks if they will be going “by balloon”—this production, originally conceived by Laura Eason of Chicago’s innovative Lookingglass Theatre, relies on Verne’s modes of transportation.

Eason has kept the basic story: Fogg, an aristocrat and a member of London’s Reform Club, makes a wager that he can cross the world and return in eighty days, at the exact time of his departure. At The Rep, Fogg is played by Lance Baker, who affects the upright carriage and the sober mien of the nineteenth-century British noble who knows his word is everything. His ramrod manner is in sync with another nineteenth-century British hero, Sherlock Holmes; but Eason has thinned out Fogg’s personality. There is no charm, none of the postmodern savoir-faire that Robert Downey, Jr. proffers in the exaggerated Holmes movie. Not until the very last scene does Baker’s Fogg truly come to life; but no matter. For the bulk of the play, he is, after all, trying to keep from falling to his death in any number of ways and perhaps falling in love with a young Indian woman, Mrs. Aouda (Ravi Batista), who he and Passepartout (Kevin Douglas) save from sacrifice.

The set design by Jacqueline and Richard Penrod does much to establish this unorthodox production. Above the stage runs fourteen shadow boxes, each containing one of Fogg’s methods of travel: as the party goes by locomotive, say, one box is illuminated; it is a subtle touch, one that adds to the play’s overall whimsical look. Off to the side, too, is a kind of bookshelf with objects like a globe and a clock that are lit when the story deems necessary. Adventure stories rely on tricks and suspense, rather than on psychology and personality. Here, the beauty of the production comes in the many ways motion is perfected: one scene onboard a steamship in which Fogg and Mrs. Aouda sit across each other having tea is depicted simply, by gently tipping their table back and forth so the teacups run from one end to the other, as the two actors simulate their own undulating motion on the water.

Because we know the story so well, the only true interest is in how the re-interpretation, like those updatings of Shakespeare’s plays or “A Christmas Carol,” will work. All of the technical innovations, after all, are but a new reason to revisit something old that we, at some level, do not want changed. And so, even as Phileas Fogg appears to have lost his bet, the suspense, which has been subordinated to spectacle for most of the play, curls up at the audience’s feet; and at the finale it is the actors who take control. Some things we do not want faked. (“Around the World” is currently running at UMKC’s Spencer Theatre through February 14.)