By Ken Keuffel
JOURNAL REPORTER
Published: September 20, 2008
The Little Theatre of Winston-Salem's current production of You Can't Take It With You is very funny.
But it manages to get a serious message across about values and priorities -- and one worth pondering as the show's many cast members astonish us with their eccentricities on the Reynolds Auditorium stage.
You Can't Take It With You was written by the famed team of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.
It conquered Broadway in the middle 1930s, running there for more than 800 performances before being made into an Academy Award-winning film. It's of another time but remains remarkably relevant to ours.
The plot revolves around the Sycamores and the Kirbys, two radically different families that are brought together because Alice Sycamore (Ashley Davis) and Tony Kirby (Ben Palombo) have fallen in love.
The Kirbys are strait-laced, normal and consumed by the Wall Street culture of building wealth.
The Sycamores are just the opposite. Each real or adopted member of that clan zealously pursues his or her own interests.
Some of their hobbies are mundane, but many others are truly bizarre and include evading the taxman for years, making fireworks in a basement, writing plays about war and sex and circulating candies wrapped in paper on which incendiary messages are printed.
The contrasts between the happy Sycamores and the (initially) unhappy Kirbys are vividly drawn in director Stan Bernstein's attractive staging. We get a palpable sense of the wacky disharmony into which the two families fall.
There are a number of fine individual performances. I found that of Mikey Wiseman particularly memorable; he plays Kolenkhov, the ballet instructor who wears his Russianness on his sleeve in exaggerated-but-endearing fashion.
And David Westfall plays Grandpa Vanderhof quite convincingly, teaching us why it's sometimes important to quit the rat race, relax and live a little.
■ The Little Theatre of Winston-Salem will present You Can't Take It With You through Sept. 28 in Reynolds Auditorium. Evening shows will be at 8 p.m. tonight, Thursday, Friday and next Saturday, with a 2 p.m. matinee Sept. 28. Tickets are $18, $16 for seniors and $14 for students. Call 725-4001.
1 comment:
Thanks for correcting "Mickey" to "Mikey," unlike the Journal! I was equally "amused" that the article last Sunday identified the director as Stan BERMAN. I guess with the reduced staff at the newspaper, spelling is no longer a leading issue.
Bill
Post a Comment