No Set or Props, but Songs to Propel the Imagination "Around the World" at the Mint Theater chronicles a journey of 80 days and thousands of miles, but it's really a journey of rediscovery, one for which the only thing you'll need to pack is a vivid imagination. Some 67 years ago, Orson Welles and Cole Porter teamed up to stage this play with music, an adaptation of Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days," on Broadway. The show ran barely two months, then more or less disappeared. The version at the Mint isn't remotely like the 1946 extravaganza, which had elaborate sets and a cast of dozens, including people credited as aerialists, snake charmers and foot jugglers. It's a streamlined concert reading, with eight actors, one pianist and no scenery. That's what makes it amusing, because the imagination gets a double workout. The actors provide expressions and accents and movement, but you have to supply the ship, the train, the many disguises employed by Inspector Fix (Neil McCaul) as he pursues Phileas Fogg (Nicholas Jones), who is trying to win a bet by circumnavigating the globe in 80 days. But while doing this, you'll also inevitably try to imagine the 1946 version, which featured Welles himself as Fix and a collection of stereotypical foreign characters that would set off taste alarms today. The reading, first performed at Sadler's Wells Theater in London, is produced by the Lost Musicals project and is a benefit for that organization. The script is fairly straightforward - you sense that much of the attraction originally must have been the opportunities it gave Welles to ham things up. Today the seldom-heard Porter songs hold the most interest, especially "Look What I Have Found," a love-at-first-sight number helped along by Rebekah Hinds's beautiful voice, and "Pipe Dreaming," nicely delivered by Rob Eyles. A fully staged adaptation of "Around the World in 80 Days" by the YOW! Theater Company was running at the New Theater as recently as October, a loud and colorful steampunk affair. Whether Verne's story, published in 1873, holds up well enough to deserve all this revisiting is questionable, but those Porter songs certainly help its case.