You Can’t Take it With
You at the Longacre Theatre
(L-R): James Earl Jones, Kristine Nielsen, Fran Kranz, Will Brill, Annaleigh Ashford, Patrick Kerr, and Mark Linn-Baker in You Can't Take it With You.
In a season
that is to be filled with revivals of all shapes and sizes, it’s nice to have
one traditional, reassuring one of a kind you don’t see on Broadway very often
anymore. You Can’t Take it With You, at the Longacre Theatre, is fun, funny,
and true to its material. Director Scott
Ellis (also represented this season by the upcoming The Elephant Man) has created a world that defiantly rests in 1936
New York, the original setting of the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart,
then six years into a successful partnership.
The comedy is raucous and joyous, the romance sappy, and the values
progressive yet comforting. In short,
it’s a great farce of the old school, and since no one could improve one of
those anyway, Mr. Ellis wisely doesn’t go about trying.
The play
stars an energetic and captivating James Earl Jones as Martin Vanderhof, the
patriarch of the eccentric and happy-go-lucky Sycamore family, which is,
unexplainedly, otherwise entirely white.
But it’s an ensemble piece, rounded out by too many talented actors to
mention. Kristine Nielsen (Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike) as
Penny Sycamore, Martin’s playwright daughter, is loopy and sweet. Annaleigh Ashford of Kinky Boots, as Penelope’s daughter Essie, a candymaker and
aspiring dancer, is surprisingly hilarious and light on her feet, fulfilling
what is clearly a tightly defined comic language for the play for which Mr.
Ellis is to be congratulated. Will
Brill, as her husband Ed, is a delightful counterbalance with a comic style
reminiscent of Peewee Herman. And Rose
Byrne, as Penny’s other, saner, love-struck daughter Alice, makes excellent, if
occasionally weepy, familial glue. The
cast is a well-oiled machine. Not a mark
is missed, nor is the timing of Kaufman and Hart’s brilliant lines ever off by
a second. It’s one of the better comedic
ensembles I’ve yet seen, all doing its work in a beautiful world created by prolific set designer David Rockwell.
The story
of the two families that just don’t mix — in this case the wacky, odd-job-holding
Sycamores and the Kirbys, the brethren of Alice’s paramour, Tony (Fran
Kranz) — has been seen before and will be again.
What makes You Can’t Take it With
You unique, and always has, are its ideals, as expounded upon
repeatedly — but never preachily — by Martin over the course of the play. Do only what you truly want to, explains the
jolly grandfather, and don’t waste your life on things that will make you
unhappy. It’s this anarchic spirit that
fuels the comedy of the play — Martin refusing to pay his income taxes, Penny
becoming a playwright because a typewriter is delivered to the house by
mistake, Penny’s husband Paul (Mark Linn-Baker) making fireworks without a
license in the cellar. And it’s the
comedy that makes the Sycamores so much fun.
All in all,
the performance of You Can’t Take it With
You I attended was some of the greatest fun I’ve had at the theater in
recent memory. And in post-Depression,
pre-war America, just when things were beginning to brighten a little, I can
imagine audiences felt much the same way.
I felt I was walking in their shoes when, as I left the theater, I
imagined Kaufman and Hart pacing anxiously at the back of the orchestra, like a
scene out of Act One. That’s because Mr. Ellis and this delicious
group of actors have succeeded in transplanting the audience back to when this
play was a new sensation—and, in doing so, have made it one of the hottest and
best plays of the fall of 2014. I’ve never
been happier to live in the past.
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