OAKBROOK TERRACE, Ill.—It’s no easy thing to adapt a movie into a stage play. A movie can use lavish background sets and fascinating locations that are unavailable to the theater. In a film, everything can be stopped, re-filmed, and edited post production, while in theater you can’t just stop the action and try again if…

NEW YORK—Patricia Hitchcock O’Connell, the only child of Alfred Hitchcock and an actor herself who made a memorable appearance in her father’s “Strangers on a Train” and championed his work in the decades following his death, has died at age 93. Hitchcock died Monday in her sleep at home in Thousand Oaks, California, her daughter…

Director and producer Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 masterpiece, “Rope,” begins deceptively, with fine lilting music and scenes of an idyllic New York City block. A woman walks her baby in a stroller, a car glides down a one-way street, and a policeman escorts two boys through the light traffic. Despite omnipresent brick, glass, and concrete, the…